Investigating the Genetic Diversity of Squab Pigeon Breeds using Mitochondrial DNA COI Region

Abstract

Pigeon breeding is a long-established activity, with archaeological and written evidence dating back thousands of years. Hungarian pigeon breeding has been influenced from several directions in the past, as several trade routes crossed the historical Hungary. Therefore, the ancestors of today’s breeds probably originate partly from the East and partly from the West. The Turkish conquest left a large number of diverse pigeon breeds in Hungary, and pigeons from Russia also arrived in the Carpathian Basin through Polish mediation. Pigeons were introduced from the West thanks to Danube sailors. Seven breeds were sampled (n=5/breed) via random sampling from different districts of Hungary to carry out this study. In this study, a 540-bp sequence of the COI region of mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) was used for analysis. CLUSTALW was used for sequence alignment and MEGAX and Network for reconstruction of phylogenetic trees and with ARLEQUIN to detect diversity values, haplotype distributions, the number of polymorphisms, and nucleotide frequency values. A total of 35 haplotypes were identified in the populations studied. Nucleotide diversity (π) was 0.2889 (Hungarian breeds) and (π) 0,3364 (International breeds). Our results help to reveal the extent to which populations are genetically uniform, and to what extent they are separated from each other.

Keywords

• columba livia domestica
• genetic diversity
• squab pigeon
• mtdna
• coi region