Abstract
Gastrointestinal (GI) nematode infections are a worldwide threat to human health and animal production. In this study, we performed a genome-wide association study between copy number variations (CNVs) and resistance to GI nematodes in an Angus cattle population. Using a linear regression analysis, we identified one deletion CNV which reaches genome-wide significance after Bonferroni correction. With multiple mapped human olfactory receptor genes but no annotated bovine genes in the region, this significantly associated CNV displays high population frequencies (58.26 %) with a length of 104.8 kb on chr7. We further investigated the linkage disequilibrium (LD) relationships between this CNV and its nearby single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and genes. The underlining haplotype blocks contain immune-related genes such as ZNF496 and NLRP3. As this CNV co-segregates with linked SNPs and associated genes, we suspect that it could contribute to the detected variations in gene expression and thus differences in host parasite resistance.
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Abbreviations
- CNV:
-
Copy number variation
- CNVR:
-
CNV region
- GI:
-
Gastrointestinal
- SNP:
-
Single nucleotide polymorphism
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Acknowledgments
We thank Reuben Anderson and Alexandre Dimitriv for their technical assistance. This work was supported in part by AFRI grant no. 2011-67015-30183 from USDA NIFA. Mention of trade names or commercial products in this article is solely for the purpose of providing specific information and does not imply recommendation or endorsement by the US Department of Agriculture. The USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer.
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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
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Xu, L., Hou, Y., Bickhart, D.M. et al. A genome-wide survey reveals a deletion polymorphism associated with resistance to gastrointestinal nematodes in Angus cattle. Funct Integr Genomics 14, 333–339 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10142-014-0371-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10142-014-0371-6