Linkage Disequilibrium in Wild and Cultured Populations of Pacific Oyster (Crassostrea gigas)

Linkage disequilibrium (LD) can be applied for mapping the actual genes responsible for variation of economically important traits through association mapping. The feasibility and efficacy of association studies are strongly dependent on the extent of LD which determines the number and density of markers in the studied population, as well as the experimental design for an association analysis. In this study, we first characterized the extent of LD in a wild population and a cultured mass-selected line of Pacific oyster (Crassostrea gigas). A total of 88 wild and 96 cultured individuals were selected to assess the level of genome-wide LD with 53 microsatellites, respectively. For syntenic marker pairs, no significant association was observed in the wild population; however, three significant associations occurred in the cultured population, and the significant LD extended up to 12.7 cM, indicating that strong artificial selection is a key force for substantial increase of genome-wide LD in cultured population. The difference of LD between wild and cultured populations showed that association studies in Pacific oyster can be achieved with reasonable marker densities at a relatively low cost by choosing an association mapping population. Furthermore, the frequent occurrence of LD between non-syntenic loci and rare alleles encourages the joint application of linkage analysis and LD mapping when mapping genes in oyster. The information on the linkage disequilibrium in the cultured population is useful for future association mapping in oyster.