Genetic Uniqueness of Local Cattle Populations as Part of Homeland Heritage

Abstract

AbstractThe Slovak Pinzgau breed is characterized by many excellent features, and that is why it has spread from Austria across the whole world. In spite of the fact that the Pinzgau cattle are now an endangered population in Europe, many farmers are still interested in its preservation. The breeding aim is primarily oriented to increase the purebred population of the Pinzgau cattle. Its development can serve as a basis for a strategy of further improvement and distribution under wider European conditions. The presence of purebred local individuals has become rare and thus highlights the need to implement a national conservation strategy. There is clearly a race between the characterization of genetic resources and their loss. In a similar way, it is planned that the development of genomic tools will allow optimizing breeding strategies for ensuring the improvement of performance together with the preservation of genetic diversity. Since it is important to keep Pinzgau cattle in the original phenotype, thus pursuing a dual purpose, the objective was to appropriately distinguish between phenotypically similar populations. The approach used for populations’ structural assessment is characterized as unsupervised learning methods with specific computation algorithms. We were able to separate even closely related breeds of Slovak and Austrian Pinzgau since they incorporated an admixture with breeds involved in historical development as well as inbreeding, selection signatures and migration. Moreover, the selection tests that lack the direction of selection should be implemented within the breed types and analyses performed using breeds across the breed types should be interpreted as demographic rather than selection signatures. Results show the possibility to classify even unknown samples according to genetic data. Genetic diversity written in genetic data provides useful information for the identification of the origin of individuals. An established methodology for the distinction of genealogically close populations with high-throughput molecular information based on Slovak and Austrian Pinzgau can be proposed as a general method for the analysis of differences in all highly related breeds. Several methods have been used to assess the evidence of positive selection including the analysis of population differences. Identification of genomic regions affected by positive or natural selection associated with economically and biologically important traits is possible and improves our understanding of the connections between changes as a result of interaction with the local environment in which animals live.KeywordsDiversityGenetic admixtureHigh-density SNP dataLnkage disequilibriumSelection footprints