Sex Identification in Cattle, based on Amelogenin Gene

Abstract

Sex identification is considered an important step in the field of forensic sciences, wildlife and livestock breeding management. In the current experiment we used Amelogenin gene as a biological marker for polymerase chain reaction test to identify the sex of cattle from blood remnants, collected at slaughter house. Due to the conserved region of the gene on both sex chromosomes (X and Y) a single primers pair was employed to amplify the gene in a single polymerase chain reaction. In case of band patterns, a 178 base pair fragment for AMELY and a 241 base pair fragment for AMELX genes were produced. The primers competence and exactness was initially checked on known gender cattle samples and then applied to unknown cattle samples for the validation of the experiment. PCR amplicons of unknown gender showed only one band (241-bp) for female DNA and two bands (241-bp, 178-bp) for male DNA, on the platform of agarose gel upon electrophoresis. Our findings showed that the PCR protocol based on AMELX/Y gene is a reliable technique for the identification of cattle sex.