Genetic Relationships among Australian and Mongolian Fleece-bearing Goats

Microsatellites (MS) are useful for quantifying genetic variation within and between populations and for describing the evolutionary relationships of closely related populations. The main objectives of this work were to estimate genetic parameters, measure genetic distances and reconstruct phylogenetic relationships between Australian Angora/Angora_Aus/ and Cashmere/Cashmere_Aus/ populations and three Mongolian Cashmere goat (Bayandelger/BD/, Zavkhan Buural/ZB/, and Gobi Gurvan Saikhan/GGS/) populations based on variation at fourteen MS loci. The level and pattern of observed and expected heterozygosity and polymorphic information content of the fourteen loci studied across the populations were quite similar and high. Except for SRCRSP07, all studied microsatellites were in Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium (p<0.001). Moderate genetic variation (7.5%) was found between the five goat populations with 92.5% of total genetic variation attributable to diversity existing between the individuals within each population. The greatest Nei's genetic distances were found between the Angora and four Cashmere populations (0.201-0.276) and the lowest distances were between the Mongolian Cashmere goat populations (0.026-0.031). Compared with other Cashmere goat populations, the GGS (crossbred with Russian Don Goats) population had the smallest pairwise genetic distance from the Australian Angora population (0.192). According to a three-factorial correspondence analysis (CA), the three different Mongolian Cashmere populations could hardly be distinguished from each other.