Characterization of marine microplankton communities of Qingdao coastal areas using randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD)

Microplankton communities of three coastal sites of Qingdao, Shandong Province, China were investigated using RAPD (random amplified polymorphic DNA) molecular markers and morphological observations. Eight RAPD-primers were selected to amplify the DNA polymorphy. The genetic distances inferred from the pairwise similari-ties were calculated for the phylogenetic tree construction. Meantime, the traditional microscopic determination, a way of visualizing the species composition, was performed to detect the major taxa of microplanktons from all samples. Results showed that:(1) the band sharing index values were in the range of 0.504 2-0.763 2 among samples from the same sampling site at different time scales, while 0.406 5-0.685 7 among the samples from different stations at the same time scales, indicating that spatial variations of microplankton communities were more pronounced than temporal ones; (2) samples from the same station basically clustered together, cor-responding to the geographic distribution of the sampling sites; (3) diversity derived from genetic and morpho-logical data did not correspond with each other well.