Background: The Awassi sheep are the dominant indigenous fat-tailed sheep breed found in Iraq, in the Fertile Crescent, within the center of the domestication and diversity of the animal species. Their productive traits and morphology are well defined. However, the genetic landscape regarding the assembly of their complete mitogenome and maternal phylogeny is not characterized yet. Materials and Methods: High throughput genomic sequencing data and bioinformatics analysis were performed to assemble the complete mitogenome, identify maternal lineage and determine patterns of genetic diversity of the Iraqi Awassi sheep. Results: Phylogenetic analysis of the complete mitogenome (16617bp) positioned the maternal lineage of the Iraqi Awassi sheep into the most predominant European maternal haplogroup B. Furthermore, analysis of nucleotide diversity showed high level of mitogenomic similarity of the Iraqi Awassi sheep to Turkish Karakas, African Djallonke, Iraqi Karadi, Israeli Assaf and Jordanian Awassi sheep breeds. Conclusion: The present findings revealed the maternal phylogeny and the genetic biodiversity of the Iraqi Awassi sheep. This study contributes to the better understanding of genetic relatedness of the Iraqi native sheep with other domestic and wild sheep worldwide in the context of origin, breeding and conservation.
Key words: Genetic diversity; Mitochondrial genome; Maternal phylogeny, Next Generation Sequencing data
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