Insights on the historical biogeography of Philippine domestic pigs and its relationship with continental domestic pigs and wild boars

Abstract

The Philippine archipelago was believed to have never been connected to the Asian continent even during the severe Quaternary sea-level drops. As a result, the history of domestic pig (Sus scrofa) dispersal in the Philippines remains controversial and must have some anthropogenic origin associated with human migration events. In this study, the context of origin, dispersal, and the level of genetic introgression in Philippine domestic pigs were deduced using mitochondrial DNA D-loop analysis altogether with domestic pigs and wild boar corresponding to their geographic origin. The results revealed considerable genetic diversity (0.900±0.016) and widespread Asian pig-ancestry (94.60%) in the phylogenetic analysis, with admixed European pig-origin (5.10%) harboring various fractions of ancestry from Berkshire and Landrace. The close genetic connection between the continental wild boars and domestic pigs present in the Philippine domestic pigs corroborates our hypothesis of a genetic signal that may be associated with the recently reported multiple waves of human migrations to the Philippines. The Haplogroup D7, reported to occur only in Indo-Burma Biodiversity Hotspots, included a high frequency of Philippine domestic pig haplotypes (54.08%), which poses an interesting challenge because its distribution is not consistent with the hypothesized migration route of Neolithic Austronesian-speaking populations. We detected the first Pacific Clade signature and ubiquitously distributed D2 haplotypes (Asian major) on several Philippine islands. The analyses of mismatch distribution and neutrality test were consistent with the Bayesian skyline plot which showed a long stationary period of effective population size. The population decline was consistent with the pronounced population bottleneck in Asian and European pigs during the interglacial periods of the Pleistocene. The results of this study will support the conservation strategies and improvements of economically important genetic resources in the Philippines.