Global Journal of Animal Breeding and Genetics received 125 citations as per Google Scholar report
Mekki Boussaha, Rabia Letaief, Nikolay Yudin, Mikhail Voevoda and Dominique Rocha
We present here the first genome-wide characterization of linkage disequilibrium (LD) in the Ukrainian Grey (UKR) cattle breed, a very ancient beef breed. The aim of our study was to assess the pattern and extent of LD in Ukraine. We used a sample of 48 animals and 37,576 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) covering all cattle autosomes. The squared correlation of the alleles at two loci (r 2 ) was used as a measure of LD. The analysis of adjacent marker pairs revealed that the level of LD decreases rapidly with physical distance between SNPs. Overall mean r 2 was 0.218 (±0.261). Strong LD (r 2 > 0.8) and useful LD (measured as r 2 > 0.2) were observed within genomic regions of up to 534 kb and 2 Mb, respectively. Unexpectedly, our results indicate that LD extent found in UKR is comparable to LD measures in modern breeds, particularly in beef breeds, suggesting a bottleneck during conservation herd and/or breed formation. In addition, LD mapping of phenotypic traits in the UKR population should be feasible with an optimized medium-density SNP panel or using high-density genome-wide genotyping tools.
PDFShare this article