An-Najah Staff

Popular approaches for estimation of migration rates (m) and effective size (Ne) rely on the assumption of drift-migration equilibrium which is generally violated in livestock populations.

Here we propose a non equilibrium model and we apply it to two Meishan (MS) and 10 Large White (LW) lines from the European pig biodiversity project. Data on 24 microsatellite markers were used in the analysis. The posterior distribution of each of the parameters was estimated with MCMC methods. The empirical means of Ne were 31 and 28 for the two MS lines and ranged from 63 to 162 for the LW lines. Empirical means of m were less than 0.01% for MS lines and ranged from 1.16 to 2.83% for LW lines. The results showed that the non equilibrium approach was able to distinguish small isolated populations from larger less isolated ones and thus can be a valuable tool to make management and conservation decisions.