Genetic relationships in Spanish dog breeds II. The analysis of biochemical polymorphism

Abstract

The phylogenetic relationships between 10 Spanish dog breeds were studied using the gene frequency values obtained from the electrophoretic analysis of 21 structural genic loci that code for blood-soluble proteins and enzymes. In addition, we studied the genetic differentiation within breeds. In some cases the genetic distances between subpopulations of the same breed were greater than the genetic distances between different breeds. The average between-breed distance has a value of 0.0197 (t 0.0128), with extreme values of D = 0.000 between Gos d'Atura and Podenco lb6rico, and of D = 0.051 for the Mastin Español - Ca de Bestiar pair. The groupings of Spanish dog breeds obtained in our study from morphological and biochemical data were apparently quite similar. The correlation between enzymatic and morphological distances was, however, low (r = 0.07) and non-significant. The estimates of the divergence times among the four ancestral trunks suggest that the ancestral trunks separated independently in a relatively short interval of time, between 30 000 and 55 000 years ago.