Associations Between Microsatellites Markers and Growth Traits in Goat

Abstract

The rapid progress in the field of biotechnology gives us a great chance to improve the productivity of our native animals in short time, relatively. The situation in Saudi Arabia not differ in compare with other country in our region which have a big challenge to increase the meat production for food security purposes. The situation in goat is very far from the point which other farm animals like cattle reached today, where a complete QTLs maps for most important traits is available. But by the same way, long time ago we have a complete comparative map between goat and both sheep and cattle. According to that in the previous investigation in both sheep and cattle we collected a total of 19 loci distributed in goat different chromosomes along with a total of 1050 records from 525 individual of a crossbred of Aradi and Damascus Goat were used to perform the linkage analysis. The studied traits were body weight at birth, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, and 24 weeks of age. The association between microsatellite markers and body weights traits were estimated by stepwise partial regression. Twelve markers (BMS2325, BMS332, BM17132, BMS1316, BM1827, BM1225, BMS2142, BM1558, BMS2809, BMS1348, BMC4216 and BM1329) successfully linked to studied traits. These markers are. In general, our work design and plan successfully worked and could explained some of genetic vitiation by using microsatellites markers. Further work to build a complete QTLs map for meat production traits is necessary to make a complete view about this important species.