64 Present address: 1,6 Principal Scientists (rameshvijh @yahoo.com). 2,3 Senior Scientist, Biological Products Division IVRI, Izatnagar 243 122. 4,5 Veterinary Officers (Wild Life), Shimla, Himachal Pradesh. Indian Journal of Animal Sciences 79 (4): 406–410, April 2009 Physical and genetic attributes of Red Jungle fowl R K VIJH 1 , ST BHARANI KUMAR 2 , BINA MISHRA 3 , SUSHIL SOOD 4 , SANDEEP RATAN 5 and M S TANTIA 6 National Bureau of Animal Genetic Resources, Karnal 132 001 India Received: 30 April 2008; Accepted: 27 September 2008 ABSTRACT The Red Jungle fowl is considered to be a progenitor of modern chicken. It is found in wild in Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Asom, Tripura, Manipur and in isolated pockets of Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh states of India. The data on 25 microsatellites was generated on Red Jungle fowl. The data revealed a good degree of heterozygosity (0.579) at molecular level. The mean number of alleles per locus was 6.8. The effective number of alleles were 3.9 which pointing towards a large number of alleles to be present at very low frequency. Sixteen of the 25 loci were not in Hardy Weinberg Equilibrium providing information for the existence of population structure. The genetic base of the red jungle fowl maintained in the Pheasantry is sufficiently large as revealed by the tests for genetic bottle neck and heterozygosity values. Key words: Genetic attributes, Microsatellite, Physical attributes, Red Jungle fowl Red jungle fowl (RJF) is one of the 4 jungle fowls found in the Indian subcontinent belonging to genus Gallus, the other 3 being Grey, Ceylon and Green. The RJF is considered to be progenitor of all the domestic chicken of the world (Delacour 1965). Kanginakudru et al. (2008) provided evidence of the domestication of chicken to have occurred independently in different locations of Asia including India. The karyological profile of RJF is also 78, which is very similar to the domestic chicken (Ohno et al. 1964). The RJF is a rare case in which the domestication of a species has not resulted in the extinction of its wild ancestor. With the decline in the forest areas the numbers have dramatically reduced. Being a protected species under Wild Life Protection Act these birds are being bred in captivity and released occasionally in wild. In the present study we have made an attempt to study the level of genetic variation available in the red jungle fowls kept in captivity in 3 different locations of Himachal Pradesh on the basis of 25 microsatellite markers. We also present the physical attributes of the captive birds. MATERIALS AND METHODS The morphology and the records maintained at various aviaries were studied and morphology of the RJF was recorded. Blood samples (40) were collected from 3 locations with the permission of Department of Wild Life, Himachal. Samples (11) were collected from the Pheasantry of Chail, 10 samples from Talland and 19 samples from Gopalpur, Dharamshala. Sample (2 ml whole blood) was collected from wing vein of each bird using heparinised syringe and transported to lab in vacutainer tubes at 0–5°C. DNA was extracted from whole blood using the standard protocol (Sambrook et al. 2001). The concentration of DNA was adjudged using comparison with the standard DNA marker concentration on agarose gel. The quality of DNA was checked on 0.8% agarose gel prepared in TAE buffer. A total of 25 microsatellites were taken for the study. These were HUJ 002, HUJ 003, LEI 120, LEI 122, LEI 147, LEI 155, LEI 166, LEI 174, LEI 180, LEI 64, LEI 74, LEI 82, LEI 90, LEI 98, MCW 213, MCW 217, MCW 228, MCW 250, MCW 261, MCW 262, MCW 266, MCW 305, MCW 317, MCW 328 and MCW 84. All these were present on different chromosomes thus were unlinked and represented a large region of chicken genome. No microsatellite from W or Z chromosome was included in the present study owing to ambiguity in the location (Ben-Avraham et al. 2006). The criterion for selection of the microsatellites loci were: (i) microsatellites were in the public domain, (ii) the microsatellites were mapped and were not in linkage disequilibrium with one another, (iii) exhibited Mendelian inheritance and with at least 4 alleles reported in reference populations. The 5’ end of the forward primers was labeled with either FAM or HEX dyes. The PCR conditions were standardized for all of the 25