Comparison of the allozyme diversity in several populations of Chamaecyparis formosensis and Chamaecyparis taiwanensis

Genetic diversity within and genetic differentiation among three populations of chamaecyparis formosensis Matsum, and two populations of Chamaecyparis taiwanensis Masam. & Suzuki were investigated using one-year-old seedlings collected from central and northern Taiwan. For C. formosensis 330 seedlings from 33 seed trees were used, while for C. taiwanensis 260 seedlings from 26 seed trees were used. Eleven enzyme systems were investigated. In C. formosensis, 5 of the 21 loci examined were polymorphic. The average percentage of polymorphic loci per population was 20.6% at the 99% criterion for polymorphism. Mean expected heterozygosity ranged from 0.079 to 0.100 in the different populations. On average, there were 6.6 to 9.2% heterozygous loci per individual and 1.24 to 1.29 alleles per locus: the effective number of alleles per locus ranged from 1.09 to 1.11. In C. taiwanensis, 7 of the 20 loci examined were polymorphic and the average percentage of polymorphic loci per population was 22.5%. Mean expected heterozygosity ranged from 0.044 to 0.060. On average there were 4.5 to 5.6% heterozygous loci per individual and 1.15 alleles per locus the effective number of alleles per locus ranged from 1.05 to 1.08. The surprisingly low expected heterozygosity and percentage of polymorphic loci compared with other conifer probably reflects the insular nature of these species. Partitioning the genetic variability into within- and among-population components with F-statistics led to an estimate of within-population variation of 95% of the total variation in both C. formosensis and C. taiwanensis. Chamaecyparis formosensis had a positive fixation index (0.109) that was significantly different from zero at the 5% level, indicating that most loci have slightly higher frequencies of homozygotes. Chamaecyparis taiwanensis, however, had a fixation index close to zero (0.036), which suggests that most loci are in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. The genetic distance between C. formosensis and C. taiwanensis was 0.70, which clearly separates these two species.