178 Functional Role of Regulatory Elements Informs Complex Trait Variation and Domestication Selection in Farm Animals

Abstract

Abstract Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes (FAANG) has made significant progress on the improvement of the annotation of the functional elements, particularly non-coding regions in farm animal genomes. Different epigenomes including ChIP-seq for 4 histone marks, ATAC-seq, CTCF-seq, RNA-seq, and Hi-C across different tissues were generated. Thousands of cis-regulatory elements including promoters and enhancers across different tissues in different species were identified and annotated. A comprehensive characterization and comparison of cis-regulatory elements across tissues and species can help us understand the genetic and evolutionary basis of complex phenotypes. We demonstrate that genomic variants associated with complex traits and adaptive evolution in farm animals are significantly enriched in active promoters and enhancers. Furthermore, we reveal distinct tissue-specific regulatory elements play important roles in domestication processes. Finally, we provide biological insights on tissue-specific regulatory conservation, and by integrating genome-wide association studies on complex traits, we demonstrate that cis-regulatory elements annotation enhances our interpretations of complex traits variations in farm animals.