Genetic diversity between seven Central European cattle breeds as revealed by microsatellite analysis

Abstract

This study compares the genetic variation in seven cattle breeds from theterritory ofCentralEurope. Eleven polymorphic microsatellite loci were used to detect differences in the polymorphism of genetic markers in Czech Pied (Simmental), Slovakian Pied (Simmental), Slovakian Pinzgau,Holstein, Polish Red, German Red, and Czech Red breeds. For these loci, allele frequencies, heterozygosity, polymorphism information content, effective population size, and genetic distances were evaluated. The phylogenetic tree was constructed using the unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean and it showed that the Central European Red breeds tended to cluster together, whereas theHolstein was the most divergent from the remaining breeds. These data are discussed in the context of the known origin of respective breeds.

Keywords

• cattle breeds
• gene resources
• heterozygosity
• microsatellites