High occurrence of mitochondrial heteroplasmy in nepalese indigenous sheep (Ovis aries) compared to chinese sheep

Gorkhali, N.A., Lin Jiang, Shrestha, B.S., Xiao-Hong He, Qian Junzhao, Jian-Lin Han and Yue-Hui Ma. 2015. High occurrence of mitochondrial heteroplasmy in nepalese indigenous sheep (Ovis aries) compared to chinese sheep. Mitochondrial DNA 18: 1-3.

Heteroplasmy due to length polymorphism with tandem repeats in mtDNAs within individual was hardly studied in domestic animals. In the present study, we identified intra-individual length variation in the control region of mtDNAs in Nepalese sheep by molecular cloning and sequencing techniques. We observed one to four tandem repeats of a 75-bp nucleotide sequences in the mtDNA control region in 45% of the total Nepalese sheep sampled in contrast to the Chinese sheep, indicating that the heteroplasmy is specific to Nepalese sheep. The high rate of heteroplasmy in Nepalese sheep could be a resultant of the mtDNA mutation and independent segregation at intra-individual level or a strand slippage and mispairing during the replication.