Buffalo is a major contributing animal in livestock and in Pakistan as an agrarian country its economy. Nili- Ravi buffalo also known as “Black Gold of Pakistan” has a high potential of productivity. But its production is often effected by certain reproductive disorders, out of which silent estrus behavior act as a major limiting factor for its production, as it is difficult to proper diagnose of silent estrus it result in low fertility and ultimately yield as low productivity in buffalo. There are a number of reasons involve in silent estrus behavior such as nutrition, environment and genetics. Estrus is a polygenic trait and according to a report about 269 genes are involve in estrus. One of the major effecting gene on estrus is Arginine Vasopressin (AVP), produced by hypothalamus and released by posterior pituitary lobe. Along with a number of role in body it influences the Social behavior neural network, located in limbic system and produce the responses like sexual arousal, partner pairing, mating process and social dominancy. So the AVP accounted as a potential candidate gene for study the silent estrus behavior in Nili-Ravi buffalo. The basic aim to conduct the present study was to identify the Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) in exonic region of AVP gene and find their association to the silent estrus trait. Fifty samples in blood form of Nili-Ravi Buffalo was taken from B-block research forms UVAS, Ravi campus and Buffalo Research Institute (BRI) Pattoki. DNA was extracted using Phenol Chloroform Iso-amyl alcohol (PCI) based method, then DNA was subjected to PCR amplification, Product was precipitated and sequenced for genetic analysis. To identify the SNPs in obtained sequence the Bioinformatics tools such as BLAST and CHROMAS were applied. The three exonic regions of AVP gene were amplified using site specific primer sets. A total of 6
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polymorphic sites were identified, those all were present in exon 1. The bioinformatics analysis using PopGene32 software was performed to analyze the association of identified SNPs to the Silent Estrus Behavior. SNP were analyzed for their effect on trait and one SNP in exon-1 was analyzed for its effect on subjected trait. This genetic characterization of AVP gene may serve as the genetic source for the development of DNA based markers for used in selection of animals with better estrus trait in studies, research and commercial purposes.