Japanese Journal of Sheep Science

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To clarify the origin of the Weining sheep raised only in the Guizhou Heights of China, clustering analysis using the neighbor-joining（ NJ） method and principal component analysis（ PCA）were conducted on the basis of allele frequency data at five loci（ TF, ES, HB-ß, XP and KE）encoding for the blood protein and non-protein systems. Different electrophoretic and ion-densitometric techniques were used to identify the polymorphisms of their systems. In this study, 20 local sheep breeds raised in Eastern Asia and studied up to the present were included for comparison. The unusual distribution of the X and P allele frequencies at the HB-ß and XP loci, which show the characteristics of southern Asian sheep was observed, clearly verifying that the Weining sheep belong to a group of southern Asian group, such as the Bengal and the Myanmar sheep. Average heterozygosity at five loci of the Weining was estimated to be 0.5052, which was higher compared with other East Asian local sheep breeds（ 0.1952~0.4787）. This finding suggests that the local breed might have formed by crossbreeding. An un-rooted dendrogram deduced from Nei’s genetic distance matrix by the NJ method revealed that the Weining diverged from the Indian lineage group. The PCA method showed that the Weining was distributed separately from each of the Indian and the Mongolian-Chinese sheep groups, placing the Weining between them. Based on allele frequency data of Indian, Mongolian-Chinese and Tibetan lineage groups, the introgression of genes derived from these groups to the Weining was estimated, respectively. The values showed that the influence of the Indian lineage group on the Weining was the largest, followed by the Mongolian-Chinese lineage group and/or the Tibetan lineage group. These findings suggest that the Weining originated from the Indian sheep with additional participation by the Mongolian-Chinese sheep.

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