Polymorphism analysis of three Chinese indigenous sheep breeds by microsatellite markers

In this study, six microsatellite markers were adopted to detect the genetic diversity and analyze the genetic distance of three Chinese indigenous sheep breeds. The results showed that 161 alleles were detected in the three breeds of sheep populations, and the average effective number of alleles, the average polymorphism information content (PIC) of six microsatellite markers in fat-tailed sheep, small tailed han-sheep, Yuxi fat-tailed sheep were 5.8844, 6.3103, 4.8017 and 0.7463, 0.7790, 0.7140 respectively. Five markers were highly polymorphic except marker ILSTS011 which gave moderate polymorphic. Except markers OarFCB48, OarFCB304 and BL1038, the other three microsatellite markers deviated significantly from the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium (P<0.01) in the three breeds of sheep populations. The genetic differentiation coefficient of each locus ranged from 0.0059 to 0.1159, with an average of 0.0482, indicating a 4.82% gene variation among different populations. So the degree of differentiation among populations was low. The small tailed han-sheep and fat-tailed sheep with minimum genetic distance (0.2163) were first clustered as a group, then they clustered with Yuxi fat-tailed sheep.