Allaa AL-Haj^(1)*

 (1). Assistant Professor, Department of Animal Production, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Aleppo.

(*Corresponding author: Allaa Al-Haj . E-Mail: allaapcr7@gmail.com).

Received: 01/ 08/ 2023               Accepted: 29/ 08/ 2023

Abstract: 

The research was conducted on local Syrian chicken populations (black and brown) that were subjected to genetic improvement by selection in a previous study, which was group of parents selected from the base population and the offspring generation F1, to evaluate the genetic diversity between populations, using the molecular markers (RAPD-PCR). The importance of the research comes from the lack of local scientific research related to the genetic and molecular characteristics of the Syrian chicken, and its genotypes are mixed randomly and have not been subjected to any kind of genetic improvement, as these differences are important for molecular studies. The results of the study showed that using 12 RAPD-PCR primers, 7 of them were able to selectively amplify regions in the genome of Syrian chickens and showed clear Polymorphism differences between their bands. The molecular markers revealed 32 bands in the studied chickens and had a medium degree of genetic diversity as it amounted by 0.45, the main allelic frequency was 0.60, and the value of the Polymorphism Information Content (PIC) was 0.35. Cluster analysis to construct a genetic phylogenic tree showed that the studied accessions were distributed into three main populations, so that the RAPD-PCR markers were able to show the reflection of the phenotype and genetic improvement processes by selection on the latent genetic content. And as the markers R03 gave the largest number of bands, it reached 8 bands. This research is considered the first one in Syria to study the genetic diversity of both generations of parents and F1 of Syrian local chicken populations.

Key words: local chicken, RAPD-PCR, molecular markers, cluster analysis, genetic diversity.

Full paper in English: pdf