Genetic diversity between herds of Alpine and Saanen dairy goats and the naturalized Brazilian Moxotó breed

Abstract

Brazilian naturalized goat breeds are adapted to the semiarid conditions prevalent in the Northeast region of the country (which has the largest Brazilian goat heard) and represent an as yet uninvestigated source of genetic diversity. Currently, imported goat breeds are crossed with Brazilian naturalized goat breeds, endangering the genetic potential of the naturalized breeds. We used 11 microsatellite markers to determine the genetic diversity among imported (non-naturalized) dairy Alpine and Saanen goats and naturalized Brazilian Moxotó goats. We genotyped 292 goats from three herds (one private, one from the University of Minas Gerais and the Moxotó conservation herd from Embrapa Caprinos) and found that the general heterozygosity was 0.6952 for Alpine, 0.7043 for Saanen and 0.4984 for Moxotó goats. The number of alleles ranged from 5 (INRA005) to 11 (BM3205), with an average of 7 alleles per locus in the imported breeds and 3.5 alleles per locus in the Moxotó breed. Mean differentiation between populations was higher for herds (F ST S = 0.0768) than for breeds (F ST P = 0.0263), indicating similarity between the imported breeds and the existence of crosses between them. Nei's genetic distance was highest between the Moxotó breed and the imported breeds. These indicate that further studies using these molecular markers would be fruitful.

Structure and genetic relationships between Brazilian naturalized and exotic purebred goat domestic goat (Capra hircus) breeds based on microsatellites

“…This fact could be due to differences in the frequency, number and type of alleles founded in the two investigations, possibly due to a sampling effect. Comparing the remaining loci for the same populations, most of the loci revealed no heterozygote deficit or excess in the study of Araújo et al (2006) but our data indicated a deficit of heterozygotes. We believe that this divergence could have occurred because the remaining loci compared for the same breeds were different in the two studies, suggesting that the choice of different loci can produce different results.…”

“…This indicates an excess of homozygotes due to a high level of inbreeding in the populations. However, Araújo et al (2006) reported a different F IS value (0.0252) when they assessed the Alpine, Saanen and Moxotó breeds. This divergence in results may be understood if we consider that most of the loci analyzed in the two investigations were different.…”

“…This deviation might be the result of inbreeding, but could also have been caused by the presence of null or non-amplified alleles, allele grouping defects, a sampling structure effect or selection against heterozygotes. Araújo et al (2006) used the INRA006 and ILST011 markers to study the Alpine, Saanen and Moxotó breeds but did not detect any deviations from HWE. This fact could be due to differences in the frequency, number and type of alleles founded in the two investigations, possibly due to a sampling effect.…”

“…We included the Graúna group in our investigation to compare our results with those reported by Igarashi et al (2000). To increase the understanding about the diversity of these goat populations we also compared our results to those of Araújo et al (2006) who also used microsatellite loci to investigate the genetic diversity between Alpine, Saanen and Moxotó goats.…”

Ancestry analysis of locally adapted Crespa goats from southernmost Brazil

“…In Brazil, a few studies have recently addressed the existence of local breeds using either microsatellites or mtDNA, and all have focused on those from the northern region of the country, for example the Canindé, Graúna, Marota, Moxotó, Repartida, and Serrana Azul (Araújo et al, 2006;Menezes et al, 2006;Oliveira et al, 2007Oliveira et al, , 2010. Recently, a next-generation sequencing approach was employed to investigate genetic variation in Brazilian naturalized breeds (Moura et al, 2015).…”