Department of Animal Genetics and Breeding, College of Veterinary Science, ANGRAU Rajendranagar, Hyderabad -500 030 (A.P.)
1 Corresponding author: Senior Scientist, CARI, Izatnagar-243 122 (UP)
* Part of M. V.Sc. thesis of first author
Genetic variation and distance among White Leghorns (WLH) strains Viz. IWI, IWH, IWF and IWD (maintained under the All India Co-Coordinated Research Project, Hyderabad) undergoing long term selection for high egg number was determined using microsatellite markers. Representative samples from each strain were individually genotyped across 6 microsatellite loci (ADL0040, ADLOI52, ADL0371, GCT002, GCT004 and GCT005). Polymorphism was detected for all these loci except for GCT005. Summed over the 5 informative microsatellite loci, the number of detected alleles ranged from 3 to 6 per locus, with a mean of 4.6 per locus. The effective number of alleles (EN) varied from 1.28 (lWI) to 4.41 (IWD) between the loci. The strains: IWI and IWH showed the least genetic distance with each other while IWH and IWD appeared to be the most distant from each other. The result of this study indicated that WLH strains retained very high genetic relatedness among each other, across the examined loci, despite the continued pressure of selection over 25 generations. However, differential distribution of many alleles was evident among these strains suggesting a slower but steadily accrued diversity within the WLH strains, under study.
Microsatellite, WLH, polymorphism, alleles, diversity
