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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Genet.
Sec. Evolutionary and Population Genetics
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fgene.2024.1453295
This article is part of the Research Topic Challenges and Prospects for Conservation Genetics at XXI Century View all 7 articles

Validation of Selection Signatures for Coat Color in the Podolica Italiana Grey Cattle Breed

Provisionally accepted
Silvia Bruno Silvia Bruno 1Giacomo Rovelli Giacomo Rovelli 2Vincenzo Landi Vincenzo Landi 3Fiorella Sbarra Fiorella Sbarra 4Andrea Quaglia Andrea Quaglia 4Fabio Pilla Fabio Pilla 5Emiliano Lasagna Emiliano Lasagna 2*Elena Ciani Elena Ciani 1
  • 1 Dipartimento di Bioscienze, Biotecnologie e Ambiente, Università di Bari, Bari, Italy
  • 2 Dipartimento di Scienze Agrarie, Alimentari e Ambientali, Università degli Studi di Perugia, Perugia, Umbria, Italy
  • 3 Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Valenzano, Italy
  • 4 National Association of Italian Beef Cattle Breeders (ANABIC), San Martino in Colle, Italy
  • 5 Department of Agriculture, Environmental and Food Science, University of Molise, Campobasso, Italy

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Taurine and indicine grey cattle represent a relevant livestock resource in many countries of the world. A grey coat color, combined with pigmented skin, common in most of the grey cattle breeds, has been demonstrated to confer better adaptation to solar radiation and thermal stresses. In a previously published study, adopting the FST-outlier approach with BayeScan v2.0, we identified genomic regions differentially selected in a set of grey cattle breeds, including the Podolica Italiana, contrasted with four non-grey cattle breeds. The more supported signals were detected on BTA 2, 4, 14 and 26, encompassing more than fifty genes known to be directly or indirectly related with one or more steps in pigment biology. Here, we aimed at validating the previously observed signals by using the same methodological approach, applied to three Podolica Italiana new sample sets (N = 30 animals each, selected at the ANABIC genetic station during the performance test, as representative of the Podolica Italiana population at three different timeframes, roughly separated by 10 years intervals each), typed at 23,027 quality-controlled SNP loci. To this aim, we also analyzed the above dataset using the haplotype-based approach implemented in the hapFLK v1.4 sotfware. Both the FST-outlier and the hapFLK approaches validated the above-mentioned signals on BTA 2, 4, 14, and 26. Moreover, both methods detected additional supported regions on BTA 7 and 18, overall including 42 genes, most of which already known from the literature to be implicated in pigmentation traits.

    Keywords: Pigmentation, coat color, Cattle, Hair greying, selection signatures, snps

    Received: 22 Jun 2024; Accepted: 11 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Bruno, Rovelli, Landi, Sbarra, Quaglia, Pilla, Lasagna and Ciani. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Emiliano Lasagna, Dipartimento di Scienze Agrarie, Alimentari e Ambientali, Università degli Studi di Perugia, Perugia, Umbria, Italy

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