Genomic analysis in Bolivian highland Creole cattle revealed signatures selection that could be related to the Andean high-altitude adaptation.

ROGBERG MUÑOZ A.; ALVAREZ CECCO P.; FALOMIR LOCKHART A.H.; PEREIRA RICO J.A.C.; LOZAVEGA A.; ARCE CABRERA O.N.; FERNANDEZ M.E.; GIOVAMBATTISTA G.

Lleira

Congreso; 37th International Society for Animal Genetics Conference; 2019

International Society for Animal Genetics

Latin-American Creole cattle are direct descendants of the bovines introduced into America by the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors in the 16th century. Currently, Creole cattle are spread all over American countries and became adapted to different environments, evolving under low levels of breeding management, exhibiting a high degree of resistance to tropical disease and a high level of fertility. The spread of biospheres includes for example tropical rainforest, subtropical dry forest and highland steeps. In Bolivia, some Creole populations had adapted to the Andean highland plains wich are around 4000 m altitude. Those populations had been under those conditions for centuries, adapting to such environments, which could have left signatures of selection within the actual genomes. The aim of this research was to study a population of Bolivian Creole cattle from Andean highland for selective footprints. For this purpose, 67 animals were genotyped using the 50K ArBos1 microarray and compared with lowland populations. After genotyping, quality control of raw data was performed, considering call rate (?97%) by sample and by SNP. Shape-IT software was used to determine the haplotypes in all the individuals and rehhpackage, included in R software, to compute the iHS index within population. The results showed 101 significant SNPs (P ≤ 0.01) among the 29 autosomes. Chromosomes BTA2 and BTA14 showed the highest number of significant SNPs, while the highest associated peak was detected in BTA17 (P ≤ 1.10?8). Those genomic regions could be related to the adaptation of Creole populations to the over 4,000 m Andean biosphere. Further analysis needs to be done to increase the understanding of cattle adaptation to high-altitude environments.