Future Perspective of NGS Data for Evaluation of Population Genetic Structure in Turkish Cattle

Abstract

Developments in sequencing and SNP chip technologies have enabled scientists to obtain high-density genomic data from different livestock species, including cattle. Moreover, many bioinformatics tools are available to analyse high-density genomic data. Via these tools, several statistical approaches such as Principal Component Analysis and clusterin-based analyses could be conducted to reveal the genetic structure of cattle populations. However, revealing the genetic structure and selection signatures of Turkish cattle breeds is a new area of research, since the previous studies are limited with a few microsatellite data. On the other hand, rearing in different geographical and environmental conditions for a long period could possibly lead to more genetic variation in native Turkish cattle breeds compared to high-yielding culture breeds. These variations obviously cannot be detected by limited number of microsatellite markers, while Next Generation Sequencing is promising for further population structure studies. Hence this review aims to summarise previous studies and give a perspective of Next Generation Sequencing possibilities to reveal the population structure of Turkish cattle for further studies.