Genetic Diversity of Wild Boar Populations from Iran based on Mitochondrial DNA Control Region Sequences

Wildlife management and conservation requires a comprehensive picture of genetic variation and variability in geographic structures. The purpose of the present study was to assess the genetic relationship and diversity of Iranian wild boar populations by analyzing a 572 bp fragment of mtDNA control region. To this end, a dataset was created using our sequences (29 wild boar) together with additional 75 sequences (from the south of Iran) downloaded from GenBank. Our analyses identified four distinct maternal clades within Iranian wild boars including Near East 1 (NE1), Near East 2 (NE2), Asiatic, and European. The European and NE1 clades have the smallest and largest geographical ranges in Iran, respectively. Furthermore, all of the clades are sympatrically distributed in the northwest of the country that this area could be considered as the contact zone of the four clades. According to the results, a total of 20 haplotypes were identified among the 104 sequences belonging to wild boars from Iran. The haplotype and nucleotide diversities were estimated as about 0.882 (±0.014) and 0.0145 (±0.00047), respectively. The AMOVA results of the Iranian clades demonstrated that the proportion of variation among clades (82.84%) was higher than the variation within them (17.16%). Also, the fixation index (FST) confirmed a significant genetic structure among the boar clades. Our findings revealed no evidence for a recent demographic expansion in the Iranian wild boars.