Morphological description and C-banding karyotype of Baladi Pigeon (Columba livia) occurring in Egypt

Document Type : Original Article

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Dept. Genet., Fac. Agric., Minia Univ., Minia, Egypt

Abstract

The current work provides a detailed morphological and cytogenetic study of the Egyptian Baladi pigeon (Columba livia) collected from three localities (Maghagha, Samalout, Mallawy) of Minia, (Egypt) to describe its morphometric profiling and karyotype through conventional staining and C-banding techniques. Results showed that, Pigeon birds were morphologically diverse and exhibited variations in 15 studied traits particularly those of body size, head, beak size, and appendage length. Likewise, karyotype analysis showed a diploid number (2n=80) that made up of 9 macro-chromosome pairs (8 pairs of autosomes and ZW sex chromosomes) and 62 micro-chromosomes. Results also showed that the macrochromosomes no.1 was the largest one in the karyotype and it is metacentric, while chromosome no.2 is large meta- or submetacentric. Chromosome no.3 is large sub-telocentric. Chromosome nos.4 and 5 were medium sub-metacentrics, while chromosome nos.6, 7 and 8 are small telocentric. Z chromosome was medium sized submetacentric, while W was small submetacentric. The karyotype formula is 1m + 5sm + 1st + 3t or 2m + 2sm + 1st + 3t. Birds collected from the three localities likely possessed similar karyotypic parameters. For instance, the total haploid lengths of the chromosome set are 63.68, 35.21and 36.94. C-band variations are clearly found among 8 investigated macro-chromosomes. For instance, chromosomes 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 mostly have large dark heterochromatin. It could be noted that twenty to thirty of the micro-chromosomes have clear c-banding blocks that were seen in almost all examined cells. Morphometric and cytogenetic significance of these results is discussed.

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