Short tandem repeat profiling of long term selected white leghorn population

Along-termselected White Leghorn strain was subjected to molecular analysis using 25 microsatellites to differentiate performance based DNA-marker association in three distinct sub-populations. The subpopulations were generated from 2500 hens, including samples from high producing (HP), mediocre producing (MP) and low producing (LP) 10% of population distribution for 64-weeks egg production. Resultsrevealeddistinctly diversepopulationparameters; polymorphic information content (PIC), actual number of alleles (Na), expected number of alleles (Ne) observed heterozygosity (Ho) and diversityindices (Nei and Shannon) for MP (0.41, 2.7, 2.1, 0.41, 0.48 and 0.79) that were significantly different from HP (0.36, 2.5, 1.9, 0.37, 0.43 and 0.67) and LP (0.38, 2.6, 2.0, 0.34, 0.44 and 0.73). Besides, several private alleles were found associated to all the three sub-groups. However, phylogeneticanalysisrevealedintermixed clustering pattern for the three subgroups. The STRs though informative for diversity analysis across performance linked sub-populations, were unable to delineate any association with production.