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Whole‐genome sequence analysis reveals candidate genomic footprints and genes associated with reproductive traits in Thoroughbred horse
Author(s) -
Asadollahpour Nanaei Hojjat,
Ayatollahi Mehrgardi Ahmad,
Esmailizadeh Ali
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
reproduction in domestic animals
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.546
H-Index - 66
eISSN - 1439-0531
pISSN - 0936-6768
DOI - 10.1111/rda.13608
Subject(s) - biology , genetics , gene , whole genome sequencing , genome , horse , sequence (biology) , computational biology , evolutionary biology , paleontology
The primary objective of most horse breeding operations was to maximize reproductive efficiency and minimize the cost of producing live foals. Here, we compared individual horses from the Thoroughbred population ( n = 17), known as a horse breed with poor reproductive performance, with other six horse populations ( n = 28), to detect genomic signatures of positive selection underlying of reproductive traits. A number of protein‐coding genes with significant ( p ‐value <.01) higher F ST values (616 genes) and a lower value for nucleotide diversity (π) (310 genes) were identified. The results of our study revealed some candidate genes such as IGFBP2, IGFBP5 , GDF9 , BRINP3 and GRID1 are possibly associated with functions influencing reproductive traits. These genes may have been under selection due to their essential roles in reproduction performance in horses. The candidate selected genes identified in this work should be of great interest for future research into genetic architecture of traits relevant to horse breeding programmes.