Genetic diversity of the Tornjak shepherd dog
The objective of the study was to assess the genetic diversity of the Tornjak shepherd dog by analyzing 10 micro- satellite loci. The dogs were divided into three main groups: Tornjaks from Bosnia and Herzegovina (TBA), Tornjaks from Croatia (THR), and a control group containing four subgroups: German Shepherd (GS), Belgian Shepherd (BS), crossbreeds of Tornjaks and other breeds (MIXT), and various other dog breeds (MIXA). The average number of genotypes (GN) and alleles (AN) was 19.2 and 8.4 (TBA), 8.2 and 5.4 (THR), 7.9 and 5.1 (BS), 4.4 and 3.6 (GS), 7.6 and 5.5 (MIXT), and 8.6 and 6.0 (MIXA), respectively. The average values of observed (HO) and expected heterozy- gosity (HE) were 0.7261 and 0.7392 (TBA); 0.7625 and 0.7139 (THR); 0.6857 and 0.6837 (BS); 0.4900 and 0.4640 (GS); 0.6786 and 0.6760 (MIXT); and 0.7067 and 0.7160 (MIXA), respectively. In the TBA population, “private” alleles were observed at all ten loci. The average overall inbreeding coefficient (F) value between the Tornjak and the control group was 0.0768. The AMOVA test revealed the highest degree of variation within the TBA group (55.43%), while no significant variations were observed in the control subgroup GS. The smallest differentiation for TBA was found with THR at 1.86% used the pairwise FST (pFST). The constructed Neighbor-Joining (NJ) dendrogram shows clear grouping of TBA and THR in comparison to the breeds of the control group. In relation to the data presented, a high level heterogeneity of has been established in the studied Tornjak population (TBA).