title: The origin of Chinese domestic horses revealed with novel mtDNA variants.
abstract: The origin of domestic horses in China was a controversial issue and several hypotheses including autochthonous domestication, introduction from other areas, and multiple-origins from both introduction and local wild horse introgression have been proposed, but none of them have been fully supported by DNA data. In the present study, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences of 714 Chinese indigenous horses were analyzed. The results showed that Chinese domestic horses harbor some novel mtDNA haplogroups and suggested that local domestication events may have occurred, but they are not the dominant haplogroups and the geographical distributions of the novel mtDNA haplogroups were rather restricted. Conclusively, our results support the hypothesis that the domestic horses in China originated from both the introduced horses from outside of China and the local wild horses' introgression into the domestic populations. Results of genetic diversity analysis suggested a possibility that the introduced horses entered China through northern regions from the Eurasian steppe.
authors.affiliation: College of Animal Science and Technology, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China.|Institute of Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Science, Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Science, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Yunzhou
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: Department of Genomic Medicine, J. Craig Venter Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Qiyun
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3568-6271
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: College of Animal Science and Technology, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Shuqin
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: College of Animal Science and Technology, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China.|Equine Center, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China.|Key laboratory of Animal Breeding and Genetics of Ministry of Agriculture, P.R. China.
authors.forename: Chunjiang
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: College of Animal Science and Technology, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China.|Equine Center, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China.|Key laboratory of Animal Breeding and Genetics of Ministry of Agriculture, P.R. China.
authors.forename: Changxin
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Wu
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D000829:Animals, Domestic / Q000235:genetics*; D000835:Animals, Wild / Q000235:genetics*; D002681:China; D004272:DNA, Mitochondrial / Q000235:genetics*; D014644:Genetic Variation / Q000235:genetics*; D006239:Haplotypes / Q000235:genetics*; D006736:Horses / Q000235:genetics*; D010802:Phylogeny; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA
chemical_list: D004272:DNA, Mitochondrial
keywords: Chinese indigenous horse; domestication; haplotypes; mtDNA