Abstract
BackgroundChickens represent an important animal genetic resource and the conservation of local breeds is an issue for the preservation of this resource. The genetic diversity of a breed is mainly evaluated through its nuclear diversity. However, nuclear genetic diversity does not provide the same information as mitochondrial genetic diversity. For the species Gallus gallus, at least 8 maternal lineages have been identified. While breeds distributed westward from the Indian subcontinent usually share haplotypes from 1 to 2 haplogroups, Southeast Asian breeds exhibit all the haplogroups. The Vietnamese Ha Giang (HG) chicken has been shown to exhibit a very high nuclear diversity but also important rates of admixture with wild relatives. Its geographical position, within one of the chicken domestication centres ranging from Thailand to the Chinese Yunnan province, increases the probability of observing a very high genetic diversity for maternal lineages, and in a way, improving our understanding of the chicken domestication process.ResultsA total of 106 sequences from Vietnamese HG chickens were first compared to the sequences of published Chinese breeds. The 25 haplotypes observed in the Vietnamese HG population belonged to six previously published haplogroups which are: A, B, C, D, F and G. On average, breeds from the Chinese Yunnan province carried haplotypes from 4.3 haplogroups. For the HG population, haplogroup diversity is found at both the province and the village level (0.69).The AMOVA results show that genetic diversity occurred within the breeds rather than between breeds or provinces. Regarding the global structure of the mtDNA diversity per population, a characteristic of the HG population was the occurrence of similar pattern distribution as compared to G. gallus spadiceus. However, there was no geographical evidence of gene flow between wild and domestic populations as observed when microsatellites were used.ConclusionsIn contrast to other chicken populations, the HG chicken population showed very high genetic diversity at both the nuclear and mitochondrial levels. Due to its past and recent history, this population accumulates a specific and rich gene pool highlighting its interest and the need for conservation.
Highlights
Chickens represent an important animal genetic resource and the conservation of local breeds is an issue for the preservation of this resource
Haplogroup C was mainly found in Japanese breeds while haplogroups G and F were found in chickens from the Chinese Yunnan province
We demonstrated that the local population of Vietnamese chickens, namely the H'mong chicken, showed a high genetic diversity and could not be subdivided into subpopulations [15]
Summary
Chickens represent an important animal genetic resource and the conservation of local breeds is an issue for the preservation of this resource. Local populations contribute to family poultry production, which is quite important for low income farmers from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the South Pacific. These local domestic chicken breeds, and that there may be at least two domestication centres: one in Southeast Asia (South China, Vietnam, Myanmar and Thailand) and one in the Indian subcontinent. Liu et al [7] performed the widest study, involving 900 wild and domestic chickens, and found a total of 9 haplogroups to which we will always refer in this study According to this classification, 6 to 9 haplogroups have been observed in Southeast and East Asia [7,9,10]. The heterogeneous distribution of mitochondrial lineages implies that breeds will not carry the same genetic diversity from a maternal gene pool point of view
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