Growth Hormone gene in Lama glama (Llama): Characterization and SNPs identification

DAVERIO MS; DI ROCCO F; VIDAL RIOJA L

Sevilla

Simposio; 5th European Symposium on South American Camelids and First European Meeting on Fibre Animals; 2010

Gobierno de España, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, INIA

Lama glama (llama) and Lama pacos (alpaca) are livestock source of meat, fiber, leather, transport and other products useful for the economy of the human population of northwest Argentine. In the last years the camelid utilization in Europe had experienced continuous growth following the importation of relatively large numbers of llamas and alpacas from South America. In spite of the growing interest of these animals around the world, very little is known about the genetic variability related to growth, health and other productive aspects. The use of polymorphisms of specific genes as detectable molecular markers is a promising alternative to the current methods of trait selection, once these genes are proved to be associated with traits of economic interest.The Growth Hormone (GH) has an important effect in the muscular development during the growth as well in the production and composition of milk during lactation. Polymorphisms of this gene have been associated to important traits in animal production (Etherton & Bauman, 1998; Maj A et al, 2007).The aim of this study was to identify and characterize the growth hormone gene and detect single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the species llama from Argentine. First, the GH gene was amplified by PCR in three llama individuals, using 4 pairs of primers designed on the coding sequence of the GH gene sequence of alpaca available at GenBank (access number: DQ 782970). The amplicons were purified and automatically sequenced. The analysis of the sequence verified that the llama GH gene consists of 1781 bp, organized in 5 exons highly conserved in llama, alpaca and dromedary. In the 5´ and 3´regions the TATA box and the polyadenilation site was identified, respectively. Variability of the gene was study using 20 random llama individuals from different geographic locations . As expected, non-coding regions were variable since 3 and 4 SNPs were detected in both intron A and B. Furthermore, 2 substitutions were identified in the 3´ region.The polymorphisms such as the ones presented here will be used for developing genetic markers to assay the effect of different genotypes on economically important traits.