Genetic study of Murgese horse from genealogical data and microsatellites

The black or rarely roan Murgese is a mesomorph horse, mainly reared in Apulia, recently selected for the saddle. The first official registry of Murgese was established in 1926. All the existing Murgese horses can be traced back to a small number of founders (46 founder mares and 9 stallions). This work aims to monitor the genetic structure of the actual population by analysing the available genealogical information from 2708 animals and a data-set containing 563 typing records of twelve microsatellites. Inbreeding coefficients were estimated for the whole sample and for the animals born from 1992 to 1999. A total of 23 generations were found. The average inbreeding coefficient was 0.0165 for the last three generations, whereas inbreeding was below 2% in animals born in the 92-99 period. The contribution of founders was unbalanced. The overall FIS coefficient estimation was 0.025 and suggests that mating is generally at random in the population. However, some statistics obtained from this study, i.e. the inbreeding coefficient higher than 0.015 in the 70 animals of the 19th, 20th, and 21st generations, should induce breeders to more attention in planning mating