Japanese Journal of Sheep Science

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To clarify the origin of the Ninglang black sheep raised in the Yunnan Heights of China, clustering analysis using the neighbor-joining (NJ) method and also principal component analysis (PCA) were conducted based on allele frequency data at five loci (TF, ES, HB-β, XP and KE) encoding for the blood protein and non-protein systems. Different electrophoretic and iondensitometric techniques were used to identify the polymorphisms of their systems. In this study, 22 local sheep breeds raised in East and South Asia studied up to the present were included for comparison. An unusual frequency distribution of different combined alleles such as the X and P alleles at the HB-β and XP loci, and the B and L alleles at the HB-β and KE loci and so on, which show the characteristics of northern Asian sheep groups, was observed, clearly verifying that the Ninglang black sheep belong to a group of northern Asian sheep. Average heterozygosity at five loci of the Ninglang black sheep was estimated to be 0.3769, which was nearer to those of the Sipsu and Bengal sheep. An unrooted dendrogram deduced from Nei’s genetic distance matrix by the NJ method revealed that the Ninglang black sheep diverged within the Himalayan lineage group. The PCA method plotted the Ninglang black sheep at the border between the Tibetan and Himalayan lineage groups. These findings demonstrate that the Ninglang black sheep generally belong to the Tibet-Himalayan lineage group and originated from the Baruwal sheep, belonging to the Himalayan group.

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