Genetic differentiation of draa indigenous breed and relationships with other goat populations assessed by microsatellite DNA markers

Moroccan goats are characterized by the presence of different populations identified only based on their phenotypes. The objectives of this study were to assess the genetic differentiation of the Draa goat breed and to analyze its genetic structure and its relationships with other local populations using 12 microsatellite markers. The screening was done in South Eastern and Southern Morocco on 192 animals form 5 popula-tions, including Draa, Atlas, Barcha, Ghazzalia breeds, and from a set of goats showing highly variable phenotypes grouped together into "undefined goats" population. Population structure was assessed by stan-dard diversity indices, multivariate statistics, analysis of molecular variance and bayesian clustering tech-niques. The mean allelic richness was 6.526, varying from 2.777 to 9.669. More than 88.4% of the total variance was distributed between individuals and only 1.85% was due to differences between populations. The Draa breed had the lowest observed heterozygosity (0.579), the highest inbreeding coefficient (0.161) and a higher number of deviations from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Moreover, it had the highest genetic distances from the other populations. Bayesian clustering showed a high level of admixture between popu-lations, with a single well defined cluster identifiable within Draa breed. It was concluded that the studied Moroccan goat populations have a substantial but weakly structured genetic diversity, with the exception of Draa breed which shows a higher degree of differentiation and population substructure.