International journal of advanced scientific and technical research

E Es st ti im ma at ti in ng g M Ma at te eb be el le e g go oa at t w we ei ig gh ht t u us si in ng g t th he e G Go om mp pe er rt tz z M Mo od de el

GENDERED LIVELIHOOD IMPLICATIONS FOR IMPROVEMENTS OF LIVESTOCK WATER PRODUCTIVITY IN ZIMBABWE

Scarcity, lack of access, and ineffective and inefficient use of water in Nkayi District, Zimbabwe, threaten agricultural production. The purpose of this study is to augment understanding of opportunities to increase livestock water productivity (LWP) in Nkayi District by taking into account key differences in the capacities, opportunities, and needs of women and men. There are two important types of female-headed households, de facto and de jure. The results from this study showed thatmale-headed and de facto and de jure female-headed households sharemuch in common.They all had similar areas of cropland and access to education, finances, veterinary and extension services, and transportation and markets. Households of all types had similar herd sizes. All were desperately poor with incomes much less than a dollar a day. To rise out of poverty, the knowledge, skills and effort of all household heads will be needed. In spite of severe poverty, household heads of all types are literate and have sufficient education that can help enable adoption of intervention options that can lead to increased agricultural production and improved livelihoods. The results also showed that major differences exist in terms of the roles of men and women in ownership, management and decision making related to livestock keeping and animal production. Men clearly dominate in both ownership and decision making even though women play a major role in animal management. Only in de jure female-headed households were womenmore likely thanmen to own cattle and goats. They were also more likely to be involved in farming as a primary livelihood activity. Surprisingly, men were more likely to be involved in animal management in these de jure female-headed households. Women were also excluded from water users’ and livestock producers’ associations although a minority of men was members. By not involving the already-developed capacity of women, the community loses out on a significant opportunity to increase LWP and animal production more widely. Greater inclusion of women in decision making will be an important part of future efforts to improve livelihoods through livestock development

VarGoats project: a dataset of 1159 whole-genome sequences to dissect Capra hircus global diversity

International audienceBackground Since their domestication 10,500 years ago, goat populations with distinctive genetic backgrounds have adapted to a broad variety of environments and breeding conditions. The VarGoats project is an international 1000-genome resequencing program designed to understand the consequences of domestication and breeding on the genetic diversity of domestic goats and to elucidate how speciation and hybridization have modeled the genomes of a set of species representative of the genus Capra . Findings A dataset comprising 652 sequenced goats and 507 public goat sequences, including 35 animals representing eight wild species, has been collected worldwide. We identified 74,274,427 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and 13,607,850 insertion-deletions (InDels) by aligning these sequences to the latest version of the goat reference genome (ARS1). A Neighbor-joining tree based on Reynolds genetic distances showed that goats from Africa, Asia and Europe tend to group into independent clusters. Because goat breeds from Oceania and Caribbean (Creole) all derive from imported animals, they are distributed along the tree according to their ancestral geographic origin. Conclusions We report on an unprecedented international effort to characterize the genome-wide diversity of domestic goats. This large range of sequenced individuals represents a unique opportunity to ascertain how the demographic and selection processes associated with post-domestication history have shaped the diversity of this species. Data generated for the project will also be extremely useful to identify deleterious mutations and polymorphisms with causal effects on complex traits, and thus will contribute to new knowledge that could be used in genomic prediction and genome-wide association studies

Geographical contrasts of Y‐chromosomal haplogroups from wild and domestic goats reveal ancient migrations and recent introgressions

International audienceBy their paternal transmission, Y-chromosomal haplotypes are sensitive markers of population history and male-mediated introgression. Previous studies identified biallelic single-nucleotide variants in the SRY, ZFY and DDX3Y genes, which in domestic goats identified four major Y-chromosomal haplotypes, Y1A, Y1B, Y2A and Y2B, with a marked geographical partitioning. Here, we extracted goat Y-chromosomal variants from whole-genome sequences of 386 domestic goats (75 breeds) and seven wild goat species, which were generated by the VarGoats goat genome project. Phylogenetic analyses indicated domestic haplogroups corresponding to Y1B, Y2A and Y2B, respectively, whereas Y1A is split into Y1AA and Y1AB. All five haplogroups were detected in 26 ancient DNA samples from southeast Europe or Asia. Haplotypes from present-day bezoars are not shared with domestic goats and are attached to deep nodes of the trees and networks. Haplogroup distributions for 186 domestic breeds indicate ancient paternal population bottlenecks and expansions during migrations into northern Europe, eastern and southern Asia, and Africa south of the Sahara. In addition, sharing of haplogroups indicates male-mediated introgressions, most notably an early gene flow from Asian goats into Madagascar and the crossbreeding that in the 19th century resulted in the popular Boer and Anglo-Nubian breeds. More recent introgressions are those from European goats into the native Korean goat population and from Boer goat into Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi and Zimbabwe. This study illustrates the power of the Y-chromosomal variants for reconstructing the history of domestic species with a wide geographical range