ABSTRACT
While dairy goat production, characterized by traditional production on small farms, is an important source of income in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, locally adapted breeds have not been fully consolidated over the last 100 years due to large fluctuations in population size and inconsistent breeding programs that allowed for different crossbreeding strategies. Our main objective in this study was therefore to assess the conservation status of 4 Czech (Alpine Goat, White Shorthair, Brown Shorthair and Czech Landrace) and one Slovak (Slovak White Shorthair) local goat breeds, to analyze their population structure and admixture, and to estimate their relatedness to several neighboring breeds. Our analyses included 142 goats belonging to 5 local breeds genotyped with the Illumina 50K BeadChip and 618 previously genotyped animals representing 15 goat breeds from Austria and Switzerland (all analyses based on 46,862 autosomal SNPs and 760 animals). In general, the conservation status of the Czech and Slovak local goat breeds was satisfactory, with the exception of the Brown Shorthair goat, as the analyzed parameters (heterozygosity, haplotype richness, ROH-based inbreeding and effective population size) were mostly above the median of 20 breeds. However, for all 5 Czech and Slovakian breeds, an examination of historical effective population size indicated a substantial decline about 8 to 22 generations ago. In addition, our study revealed that the Czech and Slovakian breeds are not fully consolidated; for instance, White Shorthair and Brown Shorthair were not clearly distinguishable. Considerable admixture, especially in Czech Landrace (effective number of parental clusters equal to 4.2), and low but numerous migration rates from other Austrian and Swiss breeds were found. These results provide valuable insights for future breeding programs and genetic diversity management of local Czech and Slovak goat breeds.
