Signature of Indian native chicken breeds: a perspective.

Native chicken in India assumes a significant role in contemplating rural economy. The local birds play a major role in providing subsidiary income and nutritional security to the people of India. A total of 19 native chicken breeds have been reported and registered in India by ICAR-National Bureau of Animal Genetic Resources, Karnal, India, which is the nodal agency of Government of India for registering breeds of livestock and poultry. At present, the Indian native chicken population is 37.2% of the total poultry population, which contribute around 17.8% of the total egg production in the country. The Indian birds have many unique traits such as natural broodiness to hatch chicks, better adaptability to hot and humid tropical climate, resilience to some of the deadly diseases such as Newcastle disease, IBD etc., black coloured meat of Kadaknath chicken, running fast and flying, fighting habit to protect themselves from the predators, tenderness of meat similar to red meat, low mortality at high temperature and humidity when exotic birds mostly die, survival on scavenging and perform at low input diet. The major objective of this paper is to compile the characteristics of Indian native chicken breeds comprehensively so that by going through this article, the stakeholders may categorise any birds of India in a particular indigenous breed group or any other group or non-descript groups. In this article, we reviewed signature of Indian chickens to differentiate them from the exotic and other breeds of chicken. We have delineated phenotypes and molecular parameters of Indian chickens along with their performances. We have deciphered genetic distance of some of the Indian chickens from the exotic chickens revealing their unique position in the cluster. It is concluded that the breed signature has potential to distinguish Indian chicken population from exotic ones for the breed identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]