Studying Genetic Diversity and Relationships between Mountainous Meihua Chickens Using Mitochondrial DNA Control Region

The Mountainous Meihua chicken is a unique regional germplasm resource from Tongjiang County, Bazhong City, China, but its genetic structure and evolutionary relationships with other native chicken breeds in the Sichuan region remain unclear. Here, we analyzed a total of 469 sequences, including 199 Mountainous Meihua chicken sequences generated in this study, together with 30 sequences representing 13 clades and 240 sequences from seven different Sichuan local chicken breeds downloaded from NCBI. These sequences were further used to analyze genetic diversity, patterns of population differentiation, and phylogenetic relationships between groups. We show that Mountainous Meihua chicken mtDNA sequences have high haplotypic and nucleotide diversity (0.876 and 0.012, respectively) and with a T bias that is suggestive of good breeding potential. Phylogenetic analysis showed that Mountainous Meihua chickens belong to clades A, B, E, and G and have a low affinity to other chicken breeds, with a moderate degree of differentiation. A non-significant Tajima’s D indicates that no demographic expansions occurred in the past. Finally, the four maternal lineages identified in Mountainous Meihua chicken showed unique genetic characteristics.