Assessment of genetic diversity and structure of major sheep breeds from Pakistan

Abstract

The present study aimed at the genetic characterization of major economically important sheep (Ovis aries) breeds from Pakistan. A total of 155 sheep from five breeds, Balkhi (PBS), Kaghani (PKS), Damani (PDS), Salt Range (PSS) and Thalli (PTS) were analyzed for measures of genetic variability, differentiation and population structure. All the five breeds exhibited moderate to high levels of genetic diversity, with an average observed heterozygosity of 0.631 ± 0.043. The mean estimates of measures of genetic differentiation between pairs of breeds were low (F ST = 0.050 ± 0.015 and D A = 0.159 ± 0.028), and the analysis of molecular variance showed that most of the total genetic variation corresponded to differences among individuals within breeds (94.41%). Despite the low level of differentiation, Bayesian clustering suggested Thalli and Damani sheep were genetically distinct from Balkhi, Kaghani and Salt Range sheep. The clustering of Pakistani sheep did not conform to their geographical locations while it was broadly consistent with their utilities (meat and coarse wool vs milk, meat and coarse wool). The results also revealed migration and admixture between Balkhi, Salt Range and Kaghani sheep. This is the first report on genetic diversity of Pakistani sheep populations of economic importance and the information generated will have implications on genetic resources management and implementation of breeding programs for these sheep breeds.

Microsatellite and mitochondrial DNA analyses unveil the genetic structure of native sheep breeds from three major agro-ecological regions of India

“…Estimates were also comparable with that of the Kajali sheep, that belong to the NWASA region 21 and four sheep populations of the SP region; Madras Red, Mecheri, and Pattanam 27 and Tiruchi Black 28 . The genetic variability observed in this study was higher than those reported in Jordan sheep 29 , and sheep breeds of the neighboring country, Pakistan 30 . However, it was comparable to the values reported across the world, for sheep 31,32 .…”

“…F ST values of the examined Indian sheep breeds were comparable to those reported for Baltic, Chiapas, and Akkarman sheep 33 . However, it was much higher than the F ST values reported for several others like Spanish, European, Middle Eastern, Colombian, Pakistani, and Romanian sheep breeds 30,32,37 . Much lower differentiation (5.6-5.9%) has been reported in Indian sheep breeds of SP region 15,27 .…”

Genetic variability analysis of 26 sheep breeds in the Czech Republic

“…Mean number of alleles per breed was similar to the study of Tolone et al (2012), who analysed Comisana, Pinzirita, Sarda and Valle del Belice Sicilian breeds and reported values from 5.66 to 9.44. Mean number of alleles per locus across analysed breeds was also in agreement with the study of Naqvi et al (2017) in Pakistan breeds (5.73 to 7.62), Othman et al (2016) in local Egyptian breeds (5.82 to 8.18) and Loukovitis et al (2016) in 13 local Greek breeds (4.59 to 7.34).…”

Assessment of genetic diversity of Turkish and Algerian native sheep breeds

“…In the present study, the calculated MNa values belonging to Algerian sheep populations studied were found to be higher than the values stated in some studies on domestic and foreign breeds (Gaouar et al, 2016b;Loukovitis et al, 2016;Naqvi et al, 2017) but MNa values observed in Turkish sheep breeds were lower than those of native sheep breeds raised in Tunisia (Sassi-Zaidy et al, 2016). This is thought to be due to the difference in the number of microsatellites and sampling methodology used in this study.…”