Data from: New insights on water buffalo genomic diversity and post-domestication migration routes from medium density SNP chip data

The domestic water buffalo is native to the Asian continent but through
historical migrations and recent importations, nowadays has a worldwide
distribution. The two types of water buffalo, i.e., river and swamp,
display distinct morphological and behavioral traits, different karyotypes
and also have different purposes and geographical distributions. River
buffaloes from Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy,
Mozambique, Brazil and Colombia, and swamp buffaloes from China, Thailand,
Philippines, Indonesia and Brazil were genotyped with a species-specific
medium-density 90K SNP panel. We estimated the levels of molecular
diversity and described population structure, which revealed historical
relationships between populations and migration events. Three distinct
gene pools were identified in pure river as well as in pure swamp buffalo
populations. Genomic admixture was seen in the Philippines and in Brazil,
resulting from importations of animals for breed improvement. Our results
were largely consistent with previous archeological, historical and
molecular-based evidence for two independent domestication events for
river- and swamp-type buffaloes, which occurred in the Indo-Pakistani
region and close to the China/Indochina border, respectively. Based on a
geographical analysis of the distribution of diversity, our evidence also
indicated that the water buffalo spread out of the domestication centers
followed two major divergent migration directions: river buffaloes
migrated west from the Indian sub-continent while swamp buffaloes migrated
from northern Indochina via an east-south-eastern route. These data
suggest that the current distribution of water buffalo diversity has been
shaped by the combined effects of multiple migration events occurred at
different stages of the post-domestication history of the species.