Study of Genetic diversity of indigenous (Afshari, Moghani and Ghezel) and exotic (Romney, Merinos and Dorper) sheep breeds using high-density SNP markers

The use of molecular markers in recent years has been widely used to determine the genetic diversity between populations and animal species. Molecular genetics studies allow a comparison of genetic diversity within and across breeds and make a new insight to reconstruct the breed history and history of ancestral populations. The aim of this study was to investigate the genetic structure and genetic variation of indigenous and exotic sheep breeds using 50,000 SNP markers. Genotype data of indigenous breeds (Afshari, Ghezel and Moghani) and exotic breeds (Dorper, Merinos and Romney) were obtained from the Ovin HapMap project. Multiple population stratification analysis such as, population structure using multivariate statistics and model-based approach were applied. The result of all methods obviously showed the correct population differentiation. In DAPC K=4 inferred best cluster results by BIC. Despite the use of different methods, all of these methods showed a distinct structure for indigenous and exotic populations and it can be concluded that Iranian sheep breeds has more genetic similarity rather than exotic breeds and Iranian sheep breeds grouped as one category and Romney, Merinos and Dorper breeds were separated as distant groups. However, when the indigenous breeds were studied alone, the breeds were genetically separated and population differentiation statistic (Fst) for Afshari, Moghani and Qezel was 0.038, 0.107, and 0.298, respectively.