Abstract
Based on morphology, native northern European sheep breeds belong to the short tailed type, of which the Romanov is the only native example still distributed in northwest Russia. Besides this, there exist local sheep populations kept by Finno-Ugric peoples in the central Volga region, which represent additional genetic resources in the area. Four sheep populations from the central Volga region were genotyped for 20 microsatellites and compared with geographically proximate breeds (Estonian Whitehead and Blackhead, the Finnsheep and an exported and a native population of Russian Romanov) and with local populations in Estonia, Finland and Russian Karelia. Between-breed analyses including admixture analysis using molecular genetic markers and the phenotypic characteristics indicated that the Volgaic populations have not remained pure. The Viena population from Russian Karelia, the Romanov breed and, to some extent, the Komi population, have escaped extensive mixing, making them most attractive for conservation programmes. The study compared imported and native Romanov breed populations and the results suggest that the diversity parameters are markedly similar in these two populations.;
Highlights
The northern European area, extending from Iceland and Fennoscandia to the Urals, has ancient indigenous sheep that belong to the northern short-tailed breed group
Our study focuses on non-institutionalised central Volgaic sheep from the rural areas of four autonomic Republics of the Russian Federation (Komi, Mari El, Mordovia and Udmurt) (Table 1, Fig. 1)
In the 336 sheep analyzed 259 alleles were detected at the 20 microsatellite loci (Table 2), averaging
Summary
The northern European area, extending from Iceland and Fennoscandia to the Urals, has ancient indigenous sheep that belong to the northern short-tailed breed group. The majority of sheep in other parts of Europe belong to thin-tailed breed groups with long or medium-long tails 2006) and an extensive set of these breeds were recently molecularly characterized and assessed for conservation prioritisation (Tapio et al 2005b, Tapio 2006). Among the Russian short-tailed sheep the characterization is lacking and the Romanov breed is the only short-tailed sheep type that has been documented in detail (Semyonov and Selkin 1989). In recent molecular analysis (Tapio et al 2005b, Tapio 2006) this breed was, represented by an imported Romanov population in Lithuania. That study assessed one local non-institutionalised sheep population, the Viena sheep, from Russian
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