Phylogenetic relationships of Argentinean Creole with other Latin American Creole Cattle as revealed by a medium density Single Nucleotide polymorphism microarray

Abstract

The demographic history of Creole cattle in Argentina and in Latin America dates back to the time of the Spanishcolonization. This study aimed to investigate the potential use of a medium­density SNP array to describe cattlefromthe most representative andoldest herds of the Argentine Creole cattle breedregisteredat the time of theconstitution of the Argentinean Creole Cattle Breeders Association and to explore the phylogenetic relationship withCreole cattle fromother LatinAmericancountries. Toachieve this goal, genotypes from51 animals on34,008autosomal SNP were used to generate genetic distance matrices based on the proportion of shared identical­by­statealleles among individual animals and animals clustered according to their origin, analyzed by the PLINKprogram.Aneighbor­joining phylogenetic tree based on pairwise genetic distance was constructed using PHYLIP and wasprepared for visualization using FigTree. Amultidimensional scaling analysis was performed to evaluate the levelof relationship in terms of genetic distance among the different animal clusters. Genetic distances between animalsvaried from0.186 to 0.357 when considering all pairs of animals, and from0.186 to 0.338 when considering Creolepairs. The dendrogramobtained showed three major clusters. Cluster 1 included Latin American Creole cattle fromColombia, Guadalupe, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and the reference groups of Holstein and Jersey cattle. Cluster 2contained exclusively Patagonian Creole cattle, while the third cluster included the remaining Argentinean Creoles.The genetic relationship patterns obtainedvia multidimensional scaling showeda close relationship among fourgroups of Creole animals fromArgentina. The closeness between clusters can be explained in part on the basis ofearly migration of animals that gave rise to founders herds at some Argentinean locations. The outcomes of thisstudycontribute toabetter understandingof the compositionof the earlyfounder herds of Creole cattle inArgentina and the relationship with other Latin America Creole cattle populations.