Lamb meat has become increasingly popular in several nations during the last few decades, especially in Kazakhstan. Due to the rising demand for lamb meat, our sheep breeders developed a new fat-tailed sheep and named the breed Baisary. Animals of the Baisary breed are characterized by a large physique, strong constitution, stretched body, deep and wide chest, medium or large-sized fat tail, long legs (height at the withers of adult rams 85–100 cm, sheep 75–90 cm), long lanceolate ears and strong hooves. Lambs of the Baisary breed surpass their peers of the original parent breeds by 15–20% in live weight at the weaning period. To characterize the genetic structure of Baisary sheep and compare it with the ancestral breeds, we genotyped 247 individuals from five sheep breeds with Ovine SNP50K. The estimated private allelic richness ranged from 0.0030 to 0.0047, with the minimum and maximum provided by the Gissar (Giss1) and Kazakh meat-wool breeds, respectively. The highest and lowest FIS values, meanwhile, were observed in the Afghan fat-tailed population and Baisary sheep, respectively. The calculated inbreeding coefficient showed that Edilbay and Baisary sheep have excess heterozygosity. According to principal components analysis, Baisary are close to Gissar populations, the Afghan fat-tailed breed and Edilbay sheep. These results were consistent with the Admixture and phylogenetic analysis. Overall, our results indicated that Baisary sheep differ genetically from their progenitors.
Sheep husbandry is an important branch of agriculture in Kazakhstan. Modern agrarian and breeding science demands inclusion of molecular genetic and genomic data to supplement traditional methods. Here we used medium-scale SNP genotyping for the first time to determine the population structure of five local sheep breeds in Kazakhstan and their relation to global sheep diversity.Principal component analysis and model-based structure analysis of general population markers revealed two breed groups. The first group included Akzhayik and Kazak Fine-wool sheep and the second group had Edilbay, Saryarka and Kazakh Semi-coarse wool sheep. High heterogeneity of different populations of Akzhayik and Kazakh Semi-coarse wool sheep was observed. A neighborjoining tree comparing Kazakh sheep data with the dataset generated by the Sheep HapMap project supported a close relationship between Kazakh sheep varieties and ancient domestic sheep ancestors.
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