Indian Journal of Animal Research

The selection of genetically superior animals at an early stage of life, the molecular markers are used along with traditional selection. The study was carried out to identify the genetic polymorphism in the exon3 region of the Prolactin and enumerate its effect on milk production performance in Sahiwal cattle. Prolactin plays an imperative regulatory role in mammary gland development, milk emission and lactogenesis. Analysed the sequence of this gene to explore whether mutations in this sequence and it could be accountable for quantitative variations in milk production and its composition traits.

Total DNA was isolated from the blood samples of 98 pedigreed Sahiwal population. Using PCR-RFLP method and direct sequencing, noticed a single-nucleotide polymorphism in exon3 region of the Prolactin gene in 156 bp and also the effect of nongenetic factors on each trait was assessed by least-squares analysis for non-orthogonal data by a fixed model.

PCR-RFLP was done with RsaI restriction endonuclease for the identification of different genotypes. The frequency of G and A alleles of the Prolactin gene was evaluated as 0.575 and 0.425, whereas the frequencies of GG, GA and AA genotypes for the Prolactin gene were 0.45, 0.25 and 0.30, respectively. SNP (G55A) conferred an increase in test-day milk yield around 321.5 g, in test day fat yield around 13.9 g and in test day SNF yield increase was 19.4 g, respectively. High correlation was perceived from test day (TD2) onwards between test day traits and lactation milk yield indicating that selection based on identified SNP in TD2 increased test day milk yield, fat yield and SNF yield by 1.1472 kg, 29.6 gm and 45.4 gm, respectively.