establishing adequate utilization of genetic variation in developing livestock breeding programs. Cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) gene technique was used in the present study to identify and differentiate the main three Egyptian local goat breeds (i.e. Baladi, Zaraibi and Barki) via DNA barcoding to confirm its species identity and provide valuable DNA sequence source in the nucleotide online database for further studies. Blast (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) results confirmed samples to be Capra hircus (100%) with no variation among the studied breeds. On the other hand, the Fluorescently Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (F-AFLP) technique was applied to assess genetic variation among and within the three breeds for litter size character. F-AFLP analysis of triplicates per breed produced 164 polymorphic loci. At the same time fixed and private bands varied among the three breeds; 47, 17 and 14 bands and 9, 19 and 27 bands for Baladi, Zaraibi and Barki, respectively. Analysis of Molecular Variance (AMOVA) showed 3.8% and 96.1% variance among and within breeds, respectively. Population re-allocation showed that all samples of Baladi breed are outliers, Zaraibi breed one outlier and two hybrids and in Barki breed one hybrid, one outlier and one allocates itself. Private bands in excel filter (using virtual inspection in excel) showed fixed bands of 213bp molecular weight at locus 35 in both Baladi and Zaraibi breeds. These bands considered as genetic marker for litter size trait (i.e. high prolific animals).

A total of 3108 records on conception rate (CR) and 2123 on litter size (LS) were used in this study. CR data represented 1600 Damascus (D) does, 201 Barki (BR) does, 229 Baladi (BL) does and 1070 crossbred does between D and each of BR and BL, while LS represented  1070 D does, 128 BR does, 145 BL does and 775 crossbred does.  These records were used to study the effect of crossing and other fixed effects and to estimate heritability of these two traits in the Damascus goats. Statistical models included varying combination of the fixed effects of station, genotypes within station, year of mating, month of mating, and parity and the random effect of animal nested within station, genotype, year of mating   and month of mating. Variance and covariance components for Damascus data were estimated through the Gibbs Sampling technique using a model that included the fixed effects of station, year and month of mating and parity, and the random effects of doe additive genetics and permanent environmental. CR mean in different analyses ranged from 0.39 to 0.63. Damascus, with a range of CR of 0.48 to 0.63, surpassed both local breeds (ranging from 0.33 to 0.58) and was close to the crossbreds that ranged between 0.34 and 0.68.  LS mean ranged from 1.26 to 1.50 in different analyses. Baladi scored the highest in LS (1.49). Damascus ranged from 1.15 to 1.24 in different locations. LS ranged from 1.37 to 1.67 for crossbreds. For both traits there was no clear evidence of the merit of Damascus goats or their crosses over the Barki and Baladi goats. More data taken under sound herd management are needed to clarify the utility of the Damascus and its crosses. Heritability estimates+SE for CR and LT in Damascus goats were 0.03 ± 0.003 and 0.04 ± 0.003, respectively.