Mining and Polymorphic Analysis of Di-Nucleotide Microsatellites from Yak Genome

Abstract

Bos grunniens (Yak) are the most important domesticated species, which adapt to the alpine climates on the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau for thousands of years, and the researches on their genetic resources has been greatly restricted due to lack of identification and mining DNA markers from yak genome, especially effective and reliable microsatellite markers (MS). Thirty polymorphic microsatellite loci, each with di-nucleotide repeat motifs, were identified and used to analyze polymorphisms of sampled Maiwa yak population. These microsatellites comprised of 18 perfect repeats (60%), 10 imperfect repeats (33.33%) and 2 compound repeats (6.67%). All the loci exhibited different level of polymorphisms in a sampled breeding population of Maiwa yak. The Ho (observed heterozygosity) for different locus varied from 0.0000 to 0.9333 and the PIC (polymorphic information content) arranged from 0.1971 to 0.8611. The genotyping of all yak individuals and population structure analysis revealed the monomorphic genetic structure for the sampled yak population. The newly characterized microsatellites from yak genome will display potential values in molecular breeding and developing of genetic resources of yak population in the future.