Characterization of a Highly Repetitive Sequence Conserved Among the North American Morone Species

A highly repetitive DNA sequence family from the genome of the North American Morone has been cloned and characterized. This family, first identified as a HindIII repetitive element, is composed of repeat units that range from 285 to 288 bp in length and comprise approximately 5.5% of the genome. The copy number of the repeat was estimated to be 1.85 × 10⁵ per haploid genome set. Data from Southern blot analyses demonstrated that the HindIII repetitive element was tandemly organized. Sequence analysis of six cloned repeat monomers from each of the four North American Morone species, M. saxatilis, M. chrysops, M. americana, and M. mississippiensis, revealed a high degree of conservation of the monomeric unit. The intraspecific sequence variation ranged from 3.2% to 5.4%. A similar level of variation was detected between cloned monomers from the same individual, suggesting that most of the intraspecies variation may be due to variation among copies of the repeat. The interspecific sequence variation ranged from less than 4.6% between M. americana and M. mississippiensis to approximately 16% between the other Morone species pairs. Phylogenetic analysis of the repetitive element nucleotide sequences indicated that M. americana and M. mississippiensis were more closely related to each other than to any other pairs of Morone species. In addition, we reconstructed the Morone phylogeny using 22 previously described morphologic characters. Congruent relationships were obtained between both sets of data. The data suggest that the genus Morone is composed of two sets of sister taxa, M. saxatilis:M. chrysops and M. americana:M. mississippiensis. Received March 9, 1998; accepted September 30, 1998.