Fourteen different morphological traits in 169 and 131 cattle of Oulmes-Zaer and Tidili, respectively were recorded and analyzed using a multivariate approach. The characters measured included heart girth, wither height, rump height, rump length, rump width, chest depth, body length, neck length, cannon circumference, ear length, ear width, head length, horn length and tail length. Breed significantly influenced all the traits investigated. Correlation coefficients among the body measurements ranged from 0.12 to 0.85 in Oulmes-Zaer and from -0.14 to 0.81 in Tidili cattle.In the varimax rotated principal component factor analysis, three factors were extracted, which explained about 65.1% and 55.4% of the total variation in Oulmes-Zaer and Tidili cattle, respectively. The communality ranged from 0.28 (horn length) to 0.82 (heart girth) in Oulmes-Zaer cattle and from 0.25 (horn length) to 0.79 (rump height) in Tidili cattle. Stepwise discriminant analysis showed that 9 out of 14 body measurements were found to have a potential discriminatory power. The canonical discriminant analysis showed that the squared Mahalanobis distance between breed means was significant, indicating that significant differences exist between Oulmes-Zaer and Tidili breeds. The raw canonical coefficients for the first canonical variable provided the greatest difference between the breed means (1.498 vs. -1.933). The second canonical variable did not provide any difference between means. The discriminant analysis showed that 98.2% and 100% of Oulmes-Zaer and Tidili animals, respectively were correctly classified. It was concluded that clear morphological differences existed between Oulmes-Zaer and Tidili cattle indicating that there were two distinct populations. تفاصيل المقالة

Moroccan goats are characterized by the presence of different populations identified only based on their phenotypes. The objectives of this study were to assess the genetic differentiation of the Draa goat breed and to analyze its genetic structure and its relationships with other local populations using 12 microsatellite markers. The screening was done in South Eastern and Southern Morocco on 192 animals form 5 populations, including Draa, Atlas, Barcha, Ghazzalia breeds, and from a set of goats showing highly variable phenotypes grouped together into “undefined goats” population. Population structure was assessed by standard diversity indices, multivariate statistics, analysis of molecular variance and bayesian clustering techniques. The mean allelic richness was 6.526, varying from 2.777 to 9.669. More than 88.4% of the total variance was distributed between individuals and only 1.85% was due to differences between populations. The Draa breed had the lowest observed heterozygosity (0.579), the highest inbreeding coefficient (0.161) and a higher number of deviations from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Moreover, it had the highest genetic distances from the other populations. Bayesian clustering showed a high level of admixture between populations, with a single well defined cluster identifiable within Draa breed. It was concluded that the studied Moroccan goat populations have a substantial but weakly structured genetic diversity, with the exception of Draa breed which shows a higher degree of differentiation and population substructure. تفاصيل المقالة

In this study, genetic diversity of two different populations of Hamra goat breed of Morocco was investigated in 60 different samples (including 30 from Beni Arouss and 30 from Rommani) using fifteen microsatellite markers. A total of 145 alleles were detected with average number per locus of 8.67 and 8.07 in Beni Arouss and Rommani goats, respectively. The Shannon’s information index ranged from 1.58 in Rommani goats to 1.66 in Beni Arouss goats. The expected and the observed heterozygosity average over loci varied from 0.62 to 0.72 in Rommani and from 0.64 to 0.75 in Beni Arouss goats. Six markers in Beni Arouss goats and five in Rommani goats showed a significant deviation from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. The FIS values were 0.110 and 0.108 for Beni Arouss and Rommani goats, respectively. A low genetic differentiation was indicated by FST values across the two goat groups. The genetic distance of Nei between the two groups was 0.046 indicating a low genetic differentiation. This was confirmed by the analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) that showed that 99.15% of variation was distributed within genetic groups. The presence of two clusters (K=2) for microsatellite markers suggested a high level of population admixture. It was concluded that both groups (Beni Arouss and Romani) presented a high similarity and may be considered as belonging to the same population. تفاصيل المقالة