The Toda buffalo of South India was evaluated for its genetic variability and mutation drift equilibrium using a set of 25 bovine specific heterologous microsatellite markers. A total of 105 alleles were detected across 25 loci with mean effective number of alleles being 2.661. The mean observed and expected heterozygosity were 0.570 and 0.598, respectively. The test for Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) revealed significant deviations in many of the investigated loci. There were highly significant deviations from mutation drift equilibrium while the qualitative test of mode shift did not reveal any genetic bottleneck in the recent past. The mitochondrial DNA D-loop sequence analysis of 165 bp region in three buffalo breeds viz. Toda, Assamese and Murrah revealed a total of 12 haplotypes, of which five were unique and remaining seven were found to be shared among different breeds. The phylogenetic analysis indicated clustering of all the riverine buffalo haplotypes together in a single clade including Toda and Assamese while the swamp buffaloes formed a separate cluster.
Toda, microsatellite, mt-DNA variation, phylogeny
