Red blood cell enzyme biochemical polymorphism in Anatolian shepherd dog

Anatolian shepherd dog (Asd), probably the descendants of the large hunting dogs of Mesopotamia, has been the most preferred dog in Anatolia as a guard dog of flocks. Furthermore, because of their high endurance of extreme of heat and cold, recently they started to be employed in African countries and in Australia. To help the conservation and management strategies to be establihed for this highly valuable gene pool, genotypes of 108 Asd individuals, belonging to four breeding farms and to local people in a region from Central Anatolia (altogether five populations), were determined by using horizontal starch gel electrophoresis based on ESD, PGD, CA1, GOT and SOD enzyme systems. Bands observed on starch gels for Asd were compared with those obtained from 21 other individuals belonging to 7 other well-known breeds. In the present study, CA1 bands could be clearly seen perhaps for the first time in dogs. Number of the bands and their directions of mobilities for each system (ESD, PGD, GOT, SOD) were identical to those given in the literature. Furthermore, there were no mobility differences between the bands of Asd and other dogs, indicating the absence of private alleles in the Asd based on the systems studied. All systems were mesomorphic except SOD. Also, low or null variability observed in these systems is also consistent with those of the previous results. Polymorphism observed in SOD was used to calculate the heterozygosity levels of the populations. Individuals from only one of the farms, the earliest farm established, did not exhibit any polymorphism. May the inferior morphometric characteristics of this population observed by previous researchers can be attributed to the lowest heterozygosity level of this population.