VARIATION OF MULTILOCUS MINISATELLITE DNA FINGERPRINTS IN AVIAN POPULATIONS

In recent years, multilocus minisatellite DNA fingerprinting has remai ned a primary genetic technique for the quantification of nuclear DNA variation in avian populations. After surveying the literature for use of this technique in birds, frequency distributions of average band-s haring differences among individuals were generated for outbreeding po pulations across species. In these populations, unrelated individuals differed by about 75% of their bands, whereas Ist-order relatives vari ed by approximately 40%. The latter value approximated those for popul ations of other species with known or suspected histories of strong in breeding and/or genetic drift. Our frequency distributions for unrelat ed and related individuals of outbreeding species from many different orders establish a baseline against which the band-sharing counts of o ther avian populations can be evaluated for the potential effects of i nbreeding and drift.