Abstract
Due to mountain relief, sheep breeding has always been a traditional husbandry branch in the Kyrgyz Republic. The geographical location of this country in Central Asia, where the Silk Road crossed Eurasia, resulted in genetic interchange between the Kyrgyz native breeds and sheep flocks, which had been accompanying the human migrations. In this regard, genetic studies of the Kyrgyz local breeds could provide valuable information on ancestry and relations of Eurasian sheep breeds. Wide implementation of the multiple SNPs array created the possibility of assessments at the genome level. Thus, the aim of the research was to provide a pattern of whole-genome diversity and population structure of Kyrgyz local sheep breeds using OvineSNP50K BeadChip. We genotyped Kyrgyz mountain merino (KYMM, n=6), Kyrgyz local sheep (KYLO, n=8), Kyrgyz coarsewooled (KYCW, n=6), Alai coarse-wool sheep (ALAI, n=8), Gissar (GISR, n=6), Tien-Shan (TNSH, n=11). The level of genetic diversity of Kyrgyz breeds was quite high. Observed heterozygosity varied from 0.363 in ALAI to 0.388 in TNSH, while allelic richness ranged from 1.884 in KYCW to 1.927 in KYLO. Analyzing the MDS plot, we found that ALAI, GISR and KYCW clustered together and were clearly separated from TNSH and KYMM by the PC1. Such a differentiation was in accordance with the Neighbor Net graph and was confirmed by the pairwise Fst values: Fst from 0.057 between ALAI and TNSH to Fst = 0.70 between TNSH and KYCW. Fst values with the KYLO were lower (from 0.023 with ALAI to 0.037 with KYCW). The PC2 divided ALAI+GISR+ KYCW and TNSH from KYMM and KYLO. Our study is the first SNP genotyping of Kyrgyz sheep breeds. Next stage is pooling our SNP set with the data on other Eurasian sheep breeds to contribute new insights on their origin. The RSF № 14-36-00039 funded the research. Key Words: