Genetic diversity of and with potential divergence of plague resistance in the Junggar Basin plague focus based on RT1-Db1*exon1.

In the Junggar Basin plague focus, and live together, and their parasitic fleas have a similar community structure. However, has significantly higher positive rates of and anti-F1 antibody compared with . In this study, - and antiF1 antibody-negative and were collected in Qitai county, Fukang city and Mulei county of the eastern part of the Junggar Basin. The genomic DNA was extracted from their spleen tissues, and RT1-Db1*exon1 was amplified through PCR procedure and then sequenced. Sequence analysis was performed and molecular diversity parameters were calculated and compared. The results showed that there were significant differences in nucleotide composition, amino acid composition, number and distribution of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) sites and number of haplotypes between and . The nucleotide diversity () for was 0.00420 ± 0.00139, the haplotype diversity () was 0.833 ± 0.086, and the average number of nucleotide differences () was 2.02564. The for was 0.06569 ± 0.02524, and the was 1.000 ± 0.045, and the was 10.4444. The fixation index (F) value between and was 0.9207. Furthermore, the F value within (0.0275) was significantly lower than that within (0.2106), indicating a greater genetic variation of compared with . In conclusion, the genetic diversity analysis based on RT1-Db1*exon1 showed that had higher gene polymorphism and greater genetic differentiation compared with in the Junggar Basin plague focus, which might be associated with the low infection rate of .