Skip to main content

Evolutionary relationships of Red Jungle Fowl and chicken breeds

Abstract

Published results were reassessed and original data are provided regarding the origin and relatedness of four postulated chicken breed lineages, egg-type, game, meat-type and Bantam, to each other and to the basic ancestral species of jungle fowls, Gallus gallus. A system approach was employed concerning the planning of the experiments. One element of the system approach is the choice of the breeds to be compared with G. gallus. These breeds were supposed to represent major evolutionary branches of chickens. Four experiments on genetic relationships were conducted using different estimation criteria including morphological discrete characters, body measurements, biochemical markers, and the activity of serum esterase-1. The greatest similarity was found between G. gallus and the egg-type breeds of Mediterranean roots and/or true Bantams. This fact might testify that the indicated chicken groups occupied earlier stages in the evolution from the wild progenitor to the present biodiversity of chickens in the world.

(To access the full article, please see PDF)

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael N Romanov.

Rights and permissions

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Moiseyeva, I.G., Romanov, M.N., Nikiforov, A.A. et al. Evolutionary relationships of Red Jungle Fowl and chicken breeds. Genet Sel Evol 35, 403 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1186/1297-9686-35-5-403

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1297-9686-35-5-403

Keywords