Almathen F, Bahbahani H, Elbir H, Alfattah M, Sheikh A, Hanotte O
Department of Veterinary Public Health, College of Veterinary Medicine, King Faisal University, P.O. Box 400, Al-Ahsa 31982, Saudi Arabia.
Camel Research Center, King Faisal University, P.O. Box 400, Al-Ahsa 31982, Saudi Arabia.
Saudi J Biol Sci. 2022 Mar;29(3):1422-1427. doi: 10.1016/j.sjbs.2021.11.032. Epub 2021 Nov 24.
Dromedary camels () are widespread in the desert and semi-desert areas of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, some parts of southwest Asia and Australia. In the Arabian Peninsula, these well-adapted species have been classified based on their ecology into Desert camels, found mainly in the north and center of the Peninsula, Mountain camels, distributed along the west and south of the Peninsula, and Beach camels, populating the west to southwest of the Peninsula. Here, we aimed to investigate the genetic relationship between 386 camels corresponding to 12 dromedary populations from different geographical locations and ecology in the Arabian Peninsula with the genotyping of 17 microsatellite loci. No significant deviation was observed in heterozygosity, allelic richness, is (inbreeding coefficient) among the studied populations had a mean value of 0.5849, 4.808 and 0.04, respectively. A mean st (fixation index) value of 0.0304 was calculated for the various populations with the highest value obtained between racing Omani and Awarik camel populations (0.079). Both the neighbor-joining phylogenetic tree and the STRUCTURE analysis divided the populations into three different groups corresponding to their Arabian Peninsula geographic location (North, Central and West, South-West, and South-East of the Arabian Peninsula), rather than their ecological classification, with a high level of genetic admixture and gene flow among them. Investigating the genetic relationship of dromedary populations in the Arabian Peninsula can be considered as the first milestone to conserve this well-adapted species. The results obtained here need to be further validated using whole genome sequencing data.
单峰驼分布于非洲、阿拉伯半岛、亚洲西南部部分地区及澳大利亚的沙漠和半沙漠地区。在阿拉伯半岛，这些适应性良好的物种根据其生态特征被分为：主要分布在半岛北部和中部的沙漠骆驼；分布在半岛西部和南部的山地骆驼；以及栖息在半岛西部至西南部的海滩骆驼。在此，我们旨在通过对17个微卫星位点进行基因分型，研究来自阿拉伯半岛不同地理位置和生态环境的12个单峰驼种群的386头骆驼之间的遗传关系。在所研究的种群中，杂合度、等位基因丰富度和近交系数（Fis）均未观察到显著偏差，其平均值分别为0.5849、4.808和0.04。计算得出各群体的平均固定指数（Fst）值为0.0304，其中阿曼赛驼和阿瓦里克骆驼种群之间的值最高（0.079）。邻接法系统发育树和STRUCTURE分析均将这些种群分为三个不同的组，对应于它们在阿拉伯半岛的地理位置（阿拉伯半岛的北部、中部和西部、西南部以及东南部），而非其生态分类，且它们之间存在高度的遗传混合和基因流动。研究阿拉伯半岛单峰驼种群的遗传关系可被视为保护这一适应性良好物种的首个里程碑。此处获得的结果需要使用全基因组测序数据进一步验证。
