Vol. 11, Special Issue 6 (2022)

Author(s):
Vishav Pratap Singh, RK Taggar, Dibyendu Chakraborty, Bhanu Pratap Singh, Pallavi Khajuria, Simran Singh and Parul Gupta

Abstract:
The present study was carried out on a total of fifty Rambouillet sheep with the objectives to determine genetic polymorphism of KRT gene and to study association of polymorphic variants of KRT gene with wool traits. The blood samples and wool records such as greasy fleece weight (GFW) (gm), staple length (SL) (cm) and fibre diameter (FD) (µ) were collected from Rambouillet sheep maintained at Sheep Breeding and Research Farm, Reasi, Jammu. DNA was isolated and amplification of KRT1.2 gene was carried out. PCR-RFLP was performed with with restriction enzyme MspI. Population genetic indexes were calculated by using POPGEN 32. Three types of genotypes AA, AB and BB were obtained with frequency of 0.36, 0.56 and 0.08, respectively. The calculated expected homozygosity (Ho), expected heterozygosity (He), Shannon’s information index (I) and polymorphic information content (PIC) values were 0.535, 0.465, 0.65 and 0.35, respectively. The overall least-squares means and standard errors for different wool production traits i.e. GFW, FD and SL were 1323.08 ± 82.04 gm, 22.17 ± 0.16 µ and 5.02 ± 0.15 cm, respectively. Analysis of variations showed that the sex had significant effect only on GFW, whereas it had non-significant on FD and SL. The genotype had non-significant effect on all the traits under study. Males were superior in GFW. High GFW production was recorded for BB genotype (1487.50 ± 210.66 gm) followed by AB genotype (1255.36 ± 79.62 gm) and least by AA genotypes (1226.39 ± 99.31 gm) in Rambouillet sheep. No significant association was found in the Rambouillet population which may be due to the small number of observations for the present study.