Species-informative SNP markers for characterising freshwater prawns of genus Macrobrachium in Cameroon

Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) are now popular for a myriad of applications in animal and plant species including, ancestry assignment, conservation genetics, breeding, and traceability of animal products. The objective of this study was to develop a customized cost-effective SNP panel for genetic characterisation of Macrobrachium species in Cameroon. The SNPs identified in a previous characterization study were screened as viable candidates for the reduced panel. Starting from a full set of 1,814 SNPs, a total of 72 core SNPs were chosen using conventional approaches: a) allele frequency differentials, minor allele frequency (MAF) profiles, and Wrights Fst statistics. The discriminatory power of reduced set of informative SNPs were then tested using the admixture analysis, principal component analysis (PCA), and discriminant analysis of principal components (DAPC). The panel of prioritised SNP markers (i.e., N = 72 SNPs) distinguished Macrobrachium species with 100% accuracy. However, large sample size is needed to identify more informative SNPs for discriminating genetically closely related species, including M. macrobrachion versus M. vollenhovenii and M. sollaudii versus M. dux. Overall, the findings in this study show that we can accurately characterise Macrobrachium using a small set of core SNPs which could be useful for commercial breeding operations, conservation, and species assignment of this economically important species in Cameroon. Given the results obtained in this study, a larger independent validation sample set will be needed to confirm the discriminative capacity of this SNP panel for wider commercial and research applications.