NOTE: Blood Protein Polymorphism in B. frontalis, B. grunniens, B. taurus, and B. indicus

There are seven species in the genus Bos: B. taurus, B. indicus, B. banteng, B. Bison, B. grunniens, B. gaurus and B. frontalis. The relationships among the species (except B. frontalis) have been investigated based on morphological characteristics (Bohlken, 1958, 1961), cranial characteristics (Groves, 1981), mitochondrial DNA data (Miyamoto et al., 1989; Loftus et al., 1994; Bradley et al., 1996; Yu et al., 1999), and ribosomal DNA restriction site data (Wall et al., 1992). B. frontalis originated from India, Burma, and Yunnan Province of China. As far as we know, the genetic relationship between B. frontalis and the other Bos species has not been reported. In our previous studies, we reported 44 blood protein loci polymorphism of 30 mithun samples (Nie et al., 1999) and 34 blood protein loci polymorphism of 177 yaks (Tu et al., 1997). In this study, we investigate the genetic differences of blood protein loci among the 4 Bos species under the same electrophoresis condition and these shed light on the evolutionary position of B. frontalis.