Razan Hallak (1)* and Naim al-Husien1
(1) General Commission of Scientific Agriculture Center of Aleppo, GCSAR, Aleppo, Syria.
(*corresponding author: Razan Halak. E-mail : razanhalla@gmail.com)
Abstract
Awassi sheep are one of the most important breeds of sheep in the world and are characterized by high productivity in both meat and milk. So, for the importance of defining the profile for this race, the objective of this study was to identify new functionally annotated SSR markers assigned to specific chromosome regions and to ensure their accuracy and specificity by In-silico PCR. This study was carried out in the biotechnology division of Aleppo Research Center in 2019, whole genomic sequences of Awassi race (Ovis aries Awassi) have been in-silico analyzed starting from blasting them with sheep reference genome in order to define their specific loci, then comparing them to protein databases to specify their functional annotations, and mining all SSRs from all studied sequences. The study identified genetic loci for 95.9% of the studied sequences, functionally annotated the genomic sequences, and identified the loci of SSRs associated with functional proteins. 15,696 sequences were functionally annotated and assigned to specific genes, the result showed that 962 SSRs are related to genes and associated with unique and specific geneti loci, while, 524 functional SSR without association, and 61,824 SSRs with specific loci without any relation to Known genes, 53,214 functional sequences with specific genetic loci were defined without any SSRs which may be an important source of other markers, Finally, primers where designed in this study for 382 SSR linked to a functional protein with specific loci, the results of In-Silico PCR showed that 196 specialized primers gave a single amplification, which can be laboratory tested on races and species before being adopted as markers of required genes used in breeding programs.
Keywords: Sheep, Awassi, Genome, functional annotation, Bioinformatics.

Full paper in Arabic: pdf