Genetic Diversity and Conservation of South-East Asian Cattle: From Indian Zebu to Indonesian Banteng, and then to the Cambodian Kouprey

Abstract

Most domestic cattle worldwide belongs to the species Bos taurus or Bos indicus (zebu), which both descend from the wild aurochs (Bos primigenius). Other cattle species (Lenstra and Bradley, 1999) are the yak (Bos grunniens) in and around Tibet, the gayal (Bos frontalis) in Eastern India, derived from the gaur (Bos gaurus), and the Indonesian Bali cattle derived from the banteng (Bos javanicus). Since 15 years, DNA analysis has allowed a reconstruction of the origin of most domestic species (Bruford et al., 2003). For instance, analysis of mitochondrial DNA established a taurine maternal origin of all zebu populations outside Asia. Indonesian cattle breeds are supposed to be derived from zebu as well as banteng (Rollingson, 1994), species that in contrast to taurine cattle and zebu are not fully interfertile (Lenstra and Bradley, 1999). However, this mixed species origin is not supported by breeding records, while there are only sporadic molecular data (Namikawa et al., 1981; Kikkawa et al., 1995, 2003; Nijman et al., 2003; Verkaar et al., 2003 ).