PSX-14 Recent advances in understanding genetic variants associated with growth, carcass and meat productivity traits in sheep (Ovis aries): an update

Abstract

Abstract Identification of quantitative trait loci (QTL) and candidate genes that affect growth intensity is a prerequisite for the marker-assisted selection for economically important traits. The number of QTL studies on sheep is relatively small in comparison to those on cattle and pigs. Current QTL Sheep database (Sheep QTLdb) contains information on 1658 QTL for 225 different traits. A few genes and markers associated with growth, carcass and meat productivity traits have been reported. The information about QTLs from the Sheep QTLdb cannot be directly used in marker assisted selection due to the lack of essential information such as effective and reference alleles, the effect direction, etc., and requires manual curation and validation. In this study we performed comprehensive search for QTLs focusing on single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with growth and meat traits in sheep. Using 15 different keywords combinations we found 152 papers (including duplicates). Next, all the found papers were manually curated by two researches and filtered by the relevance. We selected the most relevant papers that led to the final list of 17 publications. From these 17 papers we extracted information about associated genes and QTLs (SNPs). We extracted information about associated SNPs with all available information (effect sizes, effective and reference alleles etc). In total we found information about 156 SNP-trait associations (123 unique SNPs). Also we made the list of 164 unique genes associated with growth, carcass and meat productivity traits. As the result we made the database which contains information about 156 SNP-trait associations (123 unique SNPs) and list of 165 associated genes. The updated information is freely available at https://github.com/Defrag1236/Ovines_2018. This information can be useful for further association studies and preliminary estimation of genetic variability for economically important traits in different breeds.