Abstract: By using 24 microsatellite markers, this paper studied the genetic diversity of four indigenous sheep breeds in Shandong Province. 467 alleles were detected from 164 sheep of 71 breeding groups, and the proportion of effective alleles was 49.59%. The differences of the allele number among microsatellite loci were larger than those among breeds. 123 peculiar alleles and 43 dominative alleles were found from these sheep 89% of the microsatellite markers were not in Hardy-Weinberg, and 50% of them were neutral. All the microsattelite markers were of high polymorphic (PIC＞0.5), and the values of Shannon indexes were relatively high. The observed heterozygosities (0.454~0.560) were significantly lower than their expected values (0.831~0.849). It was suggested that the four indigenous sheep breeds in Shandong Province were highly genetic polymorphic but somewhat inbred. The NJ and UPGRAM dendrograms indicated that the small-tailed and large-tailed Han sheep in west Shandong were closer in genetics, and the Shandi and Wadi sheep in east Shandong were similar. The genetic distances between different sheep breeds were accordant to geographical distances.

Key words: Soil microbial biomass C, Enzyme activity in soil, Corn growth stage