Identification of a Potential Marker for Absence of Dark Fibre in Vicugna pacos (alpaca)

Feeley, Natasha; Munyard, Kylie

131356_13397_Feeley _ Munyard AAABG 2009.pdf (101.1Kb)

Access Status

Open access

Authors

Feeley, Natasha

Munyard, Kylie

Date

2009

Type

Conference Paper

Metadata

Show full item record

Citation

Feeley, Natasha and Munyard, Kylie. 2009. Association for the Advancement of Animal Breeding and Genetics 18th Biennial Conference, Sep 28 2009: Identification of a Potential Marker for Absence of Dark Fibre in Vicugna pacos (alpaca). Barossa Valley, South Australia: Association for the Advancement of Animal Breeding and Genetics.

Source Title

Proceedings of the Eighteenth AAABG conference: Matching Genetics and Environment: a New look at an old topic

Source Conference

Association for the Advancement of Animal Breeding and Genetics 18th Biennial Conference

Additional URLs

http://www.aaabg.org/proceedings18/index.html

ISBN

978-0-646-52103-9

Faculty

Faculty of Health Sciences

School of Biomedical Sciences

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/31145

Collection

Curtin Research Publications

Abstract

The Melanocortin-1 receptor gene was sequenced in a group of 41 Australian alpacas and seven single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were identified within the coding region (D42D, N118N, L206L, E311E, T28A, G126S and R301C). Three of these SNP (T28A, G126S and R301C) showed an association with phenotypic colour variants when both skin and fibre colour were used to segregate animals into groups. We propose the identification of a haplotype (T28A/G126S), which appears to be a marker for the absence of dark pigment in alpaca fleeces. Animals with the G82/C126 combination did not have any dark pigment. Both A82G & C901T are potentially capable of altering MC1R function. It?s therefore possible that we have identified wild type (dominant) and loss-of-function (recessive) alleles of the alpaca MC1R gene.