Abstract
The Afrikaner is an indigenous South African breed of “Sanga” type beef cattle along with breeds such as the Drakensberger and Nguni. Six composite breeds have been developed from crosses with the Afrikaner. Additionally, Afrikaner has been the base from which exotic breeds were established in South Africa through backcrossing. The study examined genetic diversity of Afrikaner cattle by genotyping 1257 animals from 27 herds in different geographic areas of South Africa and Namibia using 11 microsatellite markers. Multiple-locus assignment, performed using the Bayesian clustering algorithm of STRUCTURE, revealed three underlying genotypic groups. These groups were not geographically localized. Across herds and markers, the proportion of unbiased heterozygosity ranged from 0.49 to 0.72 averaging 0.57; mean number of alleles per locus ranged from 3.18 to 7.09, averaging 4.81; and allelic richness ranged from 2.35 to 3.38, averaging 2.67. It is concluded that a low inbreeding level of 2.7% and a moderate to high degree of variation still persists within the Afrikaner cattle breed, despite the recent decline in numbers of animals.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the staff at the Department of Genetics at the University of the Free State. Also to the Agricultural Research Council-Animal Production Institute (ARC-API) and Unistel Medical Laboratories (UML) for providing the DNA databases of the seedstock animals. Likewise to the Staff at the Animal Genetics Laboratory at the ARC-API for assistance during sample analysis.
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Pienaar, L., Grobler, J.P., Scholtz, M.M. et al. Genetic diversity of Afrikaner cattle in southern Africa. Trop Anim Health Prod 50, 399–404 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11250-017-1447-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11250-017-1447-9