Polymorphisms of calpastatin gene in sheep

Calpastatin plays an essential role in the growth of skeletal muscles and post mortem meat tenderness. The objective of this research was to determine polymorphism in the calpastatin gene in a group of 212 sheep (192 ewes and 20 rams) of four breeds: Polish Merino, Berrichon du Cher, Blackheaded Mutton Sheep, and Ile de France. Polymorphism was identified using the PCR -RFLP technique in accordance with methods by Palmer et al. [9]. The amplified product with the length of 622 bp was digested with restriction enzymes MspI and NcoI. It was found that the M and N alleles were present in CA ST/MspI locus, their frequency being 83.5% and 16.5% respectively. Whereas in CA ST/NcoI locus the M allele occurred with the frequency of 95.8%, and the N allele with the frequency of 4.2%