Molecular characterization of breeds and its use in conservation

The conservation of farm animal resources is important for coping with future breeding needs and for facilitating the sustainable use of marginal areas. The increasing availability of molecular markers for most farm animal species and the development of techniques to analyse molecular variation is widening our capacity to characterise the genetic variation of breeds. In this paper we review the most popular molecular markers used in conservation and animal breeding studies, the different measures of genetic diversity that they provide, and their application for managing within-breed genetic diversity and for setting between-breed conservation priorities. We also address the relationship between genomic and marker heterozygosity, the relationship between molecular and quantitative measures of genetic diversity, and the characterization of breeds based on non-neutral markers.