Population genetic structure, linkage disequilibrium and effective population size of conserved and extensively raised village chicken populations of Southern Africa

Extensively raised village chickens are considered a valuable source of biodiversity, with genetic variability developed over thousands of years that ought to be characterized and utilized. Surveys that can reveal a population's genetic structure and provide an insight into its demographic history will give valuable information that can be used to manage and conserve important indigenous animal genetic resources. This study reports population diversity and structure, linkage disequilibrium and effective population sizes of Southern African village chickens and conservation flocks from South Africa. DNA samples from 312 chickens from South African village and conservation flocks (n = 146), Malawi (n = 30) and Zimbabwe (n = 136) were genotyped using the Illumina iSelect chicken SNP60K BeadChip. Population genetic structure analysis distinguished the four conservation flocks from the village chicken populations. Of the four flocks, the Ovambo clustered closer to the village chickens particularly those sampled from South Africa. Clustering of the village chickens followed a geographic gradient whereby South African chickens were closer to those from Zimbabwe than to chickens from Malawi. Different conservation flocks seemed to have maintained different components of the ancestral genomes with a higher proportion of village chicken diversity found in the Ovambo population. Overall population LD averaged over chromosomes ranged from 0.03 ± 0.07 to 0.58 ± 0.41 and averaged 0.15 ± 0.16. Higher LD, ranging from 0.29 to 0.36, was observed between SNP markers that were less than 10 kb apart in the conservation flocks. LD in the conservation flocks steadily decreased to 0.15 (PK) and 0.24 (VD) at SNP marker interval of 500 kb. Genomewide LD decay in the village chickens from Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa followed a similar trend as the conservation flocks although the mean LD values for the investigated SNP intervals were lower. The results suggest low effective population sizes particularly in the conservation flocks. The utility and limitations of the iselect chicken SNP60K in village chicken populations is discussed.