Genotypic comparison of some Indian chicken populations with East Lansing reference populations

International collaborations to map the chicken genome have been based mostly on 3 reference mapping populations, I in the United States (East Lansing (EL), Michigan) and the other in the United Kingdom (Compton) and III in Wageningen University (WU), the Netherlands. The specific microsatellite markers which are developed by EL and WU are prefixed by ADL and MCW, respectively. To generate the East Lansing mapping family, a single male from the inbred UCD-001 Jungle Fowl (JF) line was mated to a single female from the inbred UCD-003 White Leghorn (WL) line to produce F, progeny. For conducting this study, sixteen DNA samples of each six chicken populations with Indian origin, viz, Naked Neck (NN), Giriraja (GR, a synthetic colour strain), randomly chosen local birds (DS), White Silkies (WS) and Commercial Broilers (CB) and layers (CL) were used. Two DNA samples from JF and WL were also obtained from EL and genotyped along Indian chicken populations. Two microsatellite markers from EL (ADL158 and ADL278) and six from WU (MCW5, 16, 29, 37, 104 and MCW119) were used for genotyping of the samples. The JF and WL showed same allele sizes for ADL158 reported by EL (189 bp in JF and 217 bp in WL) but for ADL279, they showed alleles with one and two base pairs less than what was reported by EL for WL (121 bp) and JF (114 bp), respectively. The Indian populations showed alleles of JF for ADL158 with frequency range of 0.0.156-0.625, but for WL varied from 0.0-0.188, respectively. For locus ADL278, Indian populations showed frequency ranges of 0.0-0.313 and 0.0-0.406 for relevant alleles of JF and WL, respectively. White Silkies showed less similarity with WL and in six of the markers, the frequency of alleles were zero. In contrast, CB and NN showed higher similarity with JF than WL. This study revealed that these comparisons could be used to understand evolutionary history of modern chicken populations.