Genetic structure survey of Iranian native horse breeds by microsatellitemarkers

The aim of this study was to investigate the genetic structure of Iranian native horse breeds to compare genetic diversity and understanding the relationships between the populations using 11 ISAG microsatellite markers. For this reason, 565 samples of the Iranian Equestrian database from different ages including the Iranian Arab Asil, Caspian, Darehshouri, Kurdish and Turkmen and 113 samples were used for each breed. The number of observed alleles for each locus was 7 to 19 alleles with an average of 10.81 alleles, and it was 19 for ASB17 and 7 for HTG4 locus with the highest and lowest observed alleles ranking respectively. The average observed heterozygosity from the largest to the lowest rank was, Turkmen (0.68±0.11), Caspian (0.67±0.07), Kurdish (0.66±0.06) Darehshouri (0.65±0.07), and Arab Asil (0.62±0.08). Population structure analysis with UPGMA method showed that Caspian and Kurdish populations were grouped as a unit cluster while the other populations grouped as a separate cluster. These results confirmed this hypothesis that the Caspian and Kurdish populations are close to the Nisa horses. In general, the results of this study indicate that the Iranian native horses have got a high genetic diversity, despite of populations have genetic similarity and the other hand genetic clustering of the populations is consistent with their geographic distances. The result of this study shows that the ISAG microsatellite markers are polymorphic and have more efficiency for assignment genetic diversity and genetic structure analysis of Iranian native horse breeds.