Sequence variation of the mitochondrial DNA control region was studied in Manchurian pheasants (
Phasianus colchicus pallasi Rotshild, 1903) representing three geographic populations from the southern part of the Russian Far East. Extremely low population
genetic differentiation (
F
ST = 0.0003) pointed to a very high gene exchange between the populations. Combination of such characters as high haplotype
diversity (0.884 to 0.913), low nucleotide diversity (0.0016 to 0.0022), low
R2 values (0.1235 to 0.1337), certain patterns of pairwise-difference distributions, and the absence of phylogenetic structure
suggested that the phylogenetic history of
Ph. c. pallasi included passing through a bottleneck with further expansion in the postglacial period. According to the data obtained, it
was suggested that differentiation between the mitochondrial lineages started approximately 100000 years ago.
Original Russian Text © M.M. Kozyrenko, P.V. Fisenko, Yu.N. Zhuravlev, 2009, published in Genetika, 2009, Vol. 45, No. 4,
pp. 526–535.