Preliminary Analysis of Allozyme-Based Genetic Diversity of Different Poultry Chicken Types in Southwestern Nigeria

Abstract

Genetic diversity of poultry chickens in southern Nigeria was assessed using 80 poultry chickens with four allozymes markers. The different poultry chicken types are Layers, Broilers and Indigenous poultry chicken sampled from farms, market places and rural homesteads. The mean gene diversity ranged from 0.22 in indigenous chicken from Abeokuta North to 0.45 in broilers from Ijebu Imushin. Deviations from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) were not statistically significant (p < 0.05) except at the Carbonic anhydrase locus. Observed and expected heterozygote ranged from 0.20 to 0.70 with a mean of 0.44 and 0.15 to 0.5 with a mean of 0.35. Average F statistic estimate across all loci revealed FIT, FIS and FST to be -0.11, -0.16 and 0.03 respectively. All the loci were polymorphic in all the populations sampled. The measure of genetic distance between pairs of chicken types indicated that the lowest distance was between layers and broilers (0.05) and the highest distance was between layers and indigenous chicken (0.10), respectively. The estimated dendrogram clustered these chicken types into twelve sub-populations and two major genetic groups. The study suggests that chicken types populations in southwestern Nigeria may be collapsed from three chicken types into two distinct genetic groups, possibly due to extensive cross-breeding and gene flow between them, which are symptomatic of uncontrolled crossing across much of the country. The populations studied were out bred in nature with small genetic differentiations among the various populations.