Genome-Wide Survey of SNP Variation Uncovers the Genetic Structure of Cattle Breeds

The imprints of domestication and breed development on the genomes of livestock likely differ from those of companion animals. A deep draft sequence assembly of shotgun reads from a single Hereford female and comparative sequences sampled from six additional breeds were used to develop probes to interrogate 37,470 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 497 cattle from 19 geographically and biologically diverse breeds. These data show that cattle have undergone a rapid recent decrease in effective population size from a very large ancestral population, possibly due to bottlenecks associated with domestication, selection, and breed formation. Domestication and artificial selection appear to have left…

• UD
  U.S. Department of Agriculture
• A
  AgResearch
• HA
  Holstein Association USA
• MA
  Meat and Livestock Australia
• EB
  Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária
• IA
  International Atomic Energy Agency
• NF
  Norges Forskningsråd
• UC
  Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
• IL
  International Livestock Research Institute
• NI
  National Institutes of Health
• CS
  Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service
• AR
  Agricultural Research Service
• AA
  Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
• BA
  Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council

  Awards: BBS/E/R/00001610, BBS/E/R/00001618