Genetic diversity and similarity between the Amiata Donkey breed and a donkey population native from Lazio

Since 13th century Italian domestic autochthonous donkey population has been characterized by Mediterranean grey mousy ancestral phenotype, currently typical of Amiata donkey. This phenotype persisted up to 16th century when a marked introduction of Hispanic and French big sized and dark bay or darkish couloured sires occurred. The aim of this research was to evaluate the genetic diversity and similarity between the Amiata donkey breed and an autochthonous donkey population native from Lazio, using molecular markers. A total of 108 animals (50 Amiata donkey and 58 autochthonous donkey from lazio) werw genetically characterized by using 10 STR markers. Genetic similarities between breeds werecalculated by performing all possible pair-wise caomparisons between the individual multilocus genotypes. F-statistics, molacular coancestry coeficients and kinship distances werw obtained using MolKin v.3.0. A high genetic differentiation between populations was observed (Fst= 0.158; P<0.01). The between-breed genetic similarity was (0.233+- 0.085) while kinship distance (Dk) and the mean coancestry values(fij) were 0.315 and 0.290 respectively. Considering that the betwee-population coancestry would reperesent the between-breed genetic relationships at the moment of separation we could suppose that the Amiata reflects more closely the genetic composition of the ancestral population of the donkey native Lazio.In addition, the reproductive isolation of the last centuries may explain the differentiation observed by Fst and genetic similarities. In the limits of the observation field, these preliminary results would confirm the timescale raciat evolution.