Shedding Light on the Origin of Egyptian Sheep Breeds by Evolutionary Comparison of Mitochondrial D-Loop

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Egypt is a carrefour between North African Maghreb countries, East Tropical Africa, Arabian Peninsula, and Near East countries including Turkey. The aim of the present work was to describe the genetic relationships between several domestic sheep populations of these regions. All of the present-day Egyptian breeds are coarse woolen and fat-tailed, but archeologists indicate that this tail form was acquired in the Near East later from populations with a thin tail. To test this idea, we used a phylogenetic-derived program to compare the control region of mtDNA of 37 breeds with fat or thin tails. We showed that most breeds seemed to fit with the archeologist hypothesis, whereas one breed indicates a direct migration of a fat-tailed breed from Turkey. Unexpectedly, one of the breeds from South Egypt was strongly linked to the thin-tailed desert breeds of Sudan, raising the question of the events leading to this situation. ABSTRACT: (1) Background: It has been recognized that the origin of fat-tailed sheep occurred within coarse wool breeds and that this character was introgressed several times into thin-tailed populations. However, no study has investigated this idea for Egyptian breeds using mtDNA analyses. (2) Methods: Using new sequences of the control region, we constructed a database of 467 sequences representing 37 breeds including fat- and thin-tailed ones with 80 Egyptian individuals belonging to six local breeds (Barki, Fallahi, Ossimi, Rahmani, Saidi, Sohagi). The phylogenetic tree obtained with the maximum likelihood method was submitted to the Newick Extra program to count the direct and indirect links between the individuals of each breed. (3) Results: Several Egyptian breeds were strongly connected to “primitive” thin-tailed breeds from Europe, indicating a clear genetic background of the “thin tail” breed type that supports the view of archeologists. In several cases, we suspected Western Asian breeds to be involved in the introgression of the fat tail character. In contrast, the Ossimi breed showed a high affinity to a fat-tailed breed of Western Asia, suggesting a direct migration and no thin tail ancestors. The Saidi is unique as our analyses revealed its strong connection with thin-tailed Sudanese breeds.