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. 2022 Mar;29(3):1422-1427.
doi: 10.1016/j.sjbs.2021.11.032. Epub 2021 Nov 24.

Genetic structure of Arabian Peninsula dromedary camels revealed three geographic groups

F Almathen  1   2 , H Bahbahani  3 , H Elbir  2 , M Alfattah  2 , A Sheikh  2 , O Hanotte  4   5
Affiliations

Genetic structure of Arabian Peninsula dromedary camels revealed three geographic groups

F Almathen et al. Saudi J Biol Sci. 2022 Mar.

Abstract

Dromedary camels (Camelus dromedarius) are widespread in the desert and semi-desert areas of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, some parts of southwest Asia and Australia. In the Arabian Peninsula, these well-adapted species have been classified based on their ecology into Desert camels, found mainly in the north and center of the Peninsula, Mountain camels, distributed along the west and south of the Peninsula, and Beach camels, populating the west to southwest of the Peninsula. Here, we aimed to investigate the genetic relationship between 386 camels corresponding to 12 dromedary populations from different geographical locations and ecology in the Arabian Peninsula with the genotyping of 17 microsatellite loci. No significant deviation was observed in heterozygosity, allelic richness, Fis (inbreeding coefficient) among the studied populations had a mean value of 0.5849, 4.808 and 0.04, respectively. A mean Fst (fixation index) value of 0.0304 was calculated for the various populations with the highest value obtained between racing Omani and Awarik camel populations (0.079). Both the neighbor-joining phylogenetic tree and the STRUCTURE analysis divided the populations into three different groups corresponding to their Arabian Peninsula geographic location (North, Central and West, South-West, and South-East of the Arabian Peninsula), rather than their ecological classification, with a high level of genetic admixture and gene flow among them. Investigating the genetic relationship of dromedary populations in the Arabian Peninsula can be considered as the first milestone to conserve this well-adapted species. The results obtained here need to be further validated using whole genome sequencing data.

Keywords: Arabian camels; Geographical isolation; Microsatellite markers; Phylogeography.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
A) Geographical locations of sampled dromedary camels. NCW (green color): samples from the north (Hurra, Wodeh, Sofor and Shual), center (Magaheem) and west (Sahlia and Hadana) of the Arabian Peninsula. SE (red color): samples from the southeast of Arabian Peninsula (Omani and UAE dromedary populations). SW (blue color): samples from the southwest of Arabian Peninsula (Awarik and Awadi). B) Unrooted neighour-joining phylogenetic tree of the dromedary samples translated from the pairwise fixation index (Fst) values. C) STRUCTURE plots of K = 2 to K = 5 for the Arabian Peninsula dromedary populations. Hur: Hurra, Sfr: Sofor, Shl: Shual, Mghm: Magaheem, Wdh: Wodeh, Sah: Sahlia, Had: Hadana, Awrk: Awarik, Awd: Awadi, UAE: Camels from UAE, Omani P: Production Omani camels and Omani R: Racing Omani camels.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Heatmap of the pairwise (fixation index) Fst values between the dromedary populations. OmnR: Racing Omani camels, OmnP: Production Omani camels, UAE: Camels from UAE, Awd: Awadi, Awrk: Awarik, Had: Hadana, Sah: Sahlia, Wdh: Wodeh, Mghm: Magaheem, Shl: Shual, Sfr: Sofor and Hur: Hurra.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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