I am referring to the loss of cow, horse, pig, sheep, goat, chicken, turkey, honey bees breeds. Is there anyone working on the conservation of farm animals germplasm?
It depends upon the Livestock breeding policy. If you want to increase production by crossbreeding without taking care of breed conservation. It is likely that there will be breed dilution .
You can study the % of diversity among the common domesticated animals and their distribution in your surrounding areas, their pedigreed origination if available by conducting DEMOGRAPHIC STATISTICAL ANALYSES, when you will be able to confine them to groups and measure their distance of diversity.
lnathgubbi
Diversity among common domesticated animals is being preserved to a large extent through a few global storage sites that are storing spermatozoa and oocytes or embryos from around the world. Using pedigree analyses is not as accurate as many presume, because of the error rate in identifying the correct sire and dam of each animal. In the most developed countries, this error rate is 20% or greater. In thinking of diversity, we need to think about genes, not breeds. Breeds were created by mankind, but genes were created by natural selection. There is not much benefit in keeping a breed pure or isolated unless it has genes that are not in other breeds or crossbreds. Too often we confuse breeds (man-made) with mutated genes (nature-made). We are losing diversity in terms of number of animals within man-made breeds, but many of the genes are in repositories around the world.
You are right. Will there be no error in the sperm and oocyte banks ? Such banks are countable and very scarce. Pedigree sheets meticulously kept over a few generations will no doubt add value when there is not profound migration of the population studied and will be a sort of incentive for short demographic/ diversity studies.
Thank you,
lnathgubbi
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