The genetic structure of indigenous Romanian Hucul horse breed inferred from microsatellite data

The existence of the Hucul horse on the Romanian territory has been documented from the very distant past and some of the theories state that this horse originates from a wild mountain horse, similar to the Tarpan. Today, the Hucul is an independent and unique breed and belongs to the protected gene fund of original and primitive animal breeds of FAO. The main objective of this study was the analysis of genetic diversity based on microsatellites in this old horse breed from Eastern Europe. This breed has been comparatively studied to other Romanian breeds: Romanian Sport Horse, Thoroughbred and Arabian. The observed and expected heterozygosity per breed ranged from 0.662 and 0.676 (Hucul) to 0.759 (Thoroughbred) and 0.741 (Romanian Sport Horse), respectively. Hardy-Weinberg equilibrum was tested for all breed-combinations and the exact P-value over all loci and breeds was not significant. Only 12016 of the total genetic variability could be attributed to differences among breeds (F-ST=0.123, p < 0.01). The global population differentiation tests showed highly significant (p < 0.01) results for all 12 loci. The Hucul clearly demarcatedfrom the other horse population in the UPGMA tree.