Composition and Structure of D-loop mitocondrial DNA of the South American Camelids

MATÉ M.L.; DI ROCCO F.; ZAMBELLI A.; VIDAL-RIOJA L.

Potosí, Bolivia

Congreso; III Congreso Mundial sobre Camélidos y Primer Taller Internacional de DECAMA; 2003

III Congreso Mundial sobre Camélidos y Primer taller Internacional de DECAMA

Owing to the economical potential of SAC as fiber producers a number of breeding and sustainable developments are getting into practice in different countries. For these to be succesful it is important to know the genetic variability of the founding stocks as well as the replenishing populations. The molecular genetics is supplying useful tools to do these research among which the mitochondrial DNA D-loop has proved very much informative. In this work, we determined the composition and organization of the D-loop mtDNA from South American Camelids (SAC) and  identified the most suitable region to be used in population  genetics  analysis . The  D-loop of  the four SAC species was PCR amplified, ligated to pGem T-easy vector and cloned in XL1B host.  Positive colonies were sequenced in an ABI Prism 377 equipment. The results showed that the D-loop region in SAC comprise 1200 bp distributed in three domains: Conserved Sequence Blocks  (CSB) 1, 2 and 3 located close to the tRNAphe gene, Central Domain (CD) and, the Extended Termination Associated Sequence (ETAS) near the tRNApro gene. Between the CSB 1 and 2 we detected one repeated sequence 26 bp long. The alignment of all sequences from the eight SAC analysed showed two segments 240 and 350 bases long which concentrate most of the nucleotide variabili y  whithin the D-loop.  We  propose these segments as  informative markers for analysis of population genetics variablity in SAC.