Genetic polymorphisms of β-lactoglobulin and α-s1-casein genes in Romanian Racka sheep

The increasingly use of genetic markers in artificial selection shows to be a successful strategy for the animal production systems, the outcome of applying such methods being a higher animal productivity and better quality of the products. The aim of our study was to analyse the polymorphism of β-lactoglobulin and α-s1-casein loci in a population of Racka sheep from Romania. In order to identify the specific alleles we used the PCR-RFLP technique. It is known that the different genotypes observed at these loci are correlated to milk quality, either in terms of the composition, or in terms of the technological properties. We identified three genotypes (AA, BB and AB) at β-lactoglobulin locus, while at α-s1-casein locus, all the analysed animals had nonA homozygous genotype. These molecular markers are useful for the characterisation of the sheep breeds, and their genotyping can contribute to a high quality artificial selection