Genetic Variation among Populations of Pla-Mong Fish (Pangasuis bocourti Sauvage 1880) of the Mae Kong River in Northeast Thailand

This study was carried out at the Department of Fisheries, Faculty of Agriculture, Khon Kaen University, Khon Kaen, Thailand during April to September 2007 to determine DNA patterns of Pla-mong fish (Pangasuis bocourti Sauvage 1880) with the use of RAPD-PCR amplification. One hundred twenty individual fish samples were harvested from four locations along the Mae Kong River, i.e., Nongkhai, Nakornphanom, Mukdaharn and Ubon Ratchatani provinces, each location has thirty individual fish samples and the four locations were used as treatments and thirty individual fish of each location were used as replications. Sixteen RAPD decamer primers from three kits of Operon Technologies were subjected to a preliminary test and only seven decamer primers were suited most for PCR amplification. The results on both similarity correlation coefficients and genetic distances revealed that the fish of Pla-mong of the Mae Kong River could be divided into two groups, i.e., the first group included the fish harvested from Nongkhai and Nakornphanom provinces with their genetic values ranged from 0.20 to 0.36 and the second group included the harvested fish from Mukdaharn and Nakornphanom provinces with their genetic values ranged from 0.20 to 0.44.