Diversity of West African dwarf goat in southwestern Nigeria based on allozyme Markers

Abstract

Effective conservation, rational management and inadequate information on genetic diversity are the major challenges in livestock production. Genetic diversity has been used to reveal the extent of differentiation within livestock species. However, information on the use of allozymes in genetic diversity of the West African Dwarf (WAD) goat is insufficient. Therefore, genetic diversity of the WAD goat populations in southwestern Nigeria was investigated in this study. Three protein loci markers were used. Blood (5 mL each) samples were randomly collected from20, 20, 40 and 60 goats from Ondo ,Oyo, Ogun andOsun States respectively. The samples were subjected to cellulose acetate electrophoresis to determine the genetic variants at Haemoglobin (Hb), Carbonic Anhydrase (CA) and Transferrin (Tf) loci. Another set of blood (5 mL) from 20 different individual animals were randomly obtained from each of Ondo, Oyo, Ogun, and Osun States. Allele frequency, observed heterozygosity (H ), Polymorphic Information Content (PIC), F-statistic (F F and F ), gene flow (Nm), gene diversity (D), number of alleles per loci (A ), effective number of allele (AE) Mean Number of Allele (MNA) were generated from the data obtained. Data were analysed using Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) at α0.05. The allele frequency ranged between 0.11 (Hb ) and 0.58 (Hb ), 0.17 (CA ) and 0.44 (CA ) and 0.08 (Tf ) to 0.60 (Tf ). Deviation from HWE was not significant in all populations except at Tf locus (0.00). The H ranged from 0.43 to 0.62 andNm and D ranged between 3.68 and 32.40 and 0.34 to 0.50 respectively. TheMNAwas 0.67 butA ranged from 1.52 to 2.00. The allozymes revealed some level of genetic diversity and a genetic differentiation indicative of the amount of genetic differences among individualswithin theWestAfricanDwarf goat population.