Inter- and intra-population genetic divergence of East Asian cattle populations: focusing on Korean cattle

In order to facilitate the on-going cattle conservation and improvement programs in Korea, we examined genetic relationships among East Asian cattle, focusing on Korean native cattle, using complete mitochondrial DNA control region sequences. In total, 67 haplotypes were discriminated by 97 variable sites in East Asian cattle. Of the variable sites, 35 represented singleton variable sites and 62 were parsimony informative sites. For Korean cattle, 30 haplotypes were discriminated by 40 variable sites. The variable sites identified in this study correspond to transition or transversion point mutations. Inter-populations genetic distance varied from 0.004 to 0.052 for East Asian cattle populations. The genetic divergence observed between Korean Brown and Jeju Black (0.004) was among the lowest. The Mongolian cattle were slightly divergent from other East Asian cattle populations studied. The network analysis uncovered that Jeju Black and Yunbian samples represented the possible ancestral Haplotype within T3 Bos taurus main lineage. Thus, we hypothesized that the Jeju and Yunbian cattle may represent one of the original native North East Asian cattle in the region.