LE3 .A278 1999

1999

Snyder, Marlene
McLeod, Peter

Acadia University

Master of Science

Masters

Biology

Biology

Microsatellite DNA fingerprinting was used in an attempt to identify unknown scat samples from timber wolves ('Canis lupus') at the Canadian Centre for Wolf Research (CCWR) with DNA recovered from wolf faeces. Silver staining, a non-radioactive technique which is available to small labs, was used to obtain microsatellite genotypes for many of the wolves. Blood samples from a group of free-ranging wolves in Quebec were also used to validate the technique. Genotypes obtained from DNA extracted from blood and faeces collected from the same individuals always matched indicating accurate amplification of the DNA from faeces. The results are compared to other similar studies and the close overlap of alleles of this study mid alleles reported in another study strongly suggest the scoring was accurate. Confirming the CCWR pack pedigree was one of the objectives and although all the individuals were not genotyped the suspected pedigree from observational data at the CCWR matched genotypes that were obtained. While the identification of unknown scats was never attempted due to the difficulty in getting this technique to become routine, the results shown in this study suggest that with future refinement, this technique could be used to identify individual scats.

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