Long divergent haplotypes introgressed from wild sheep are associated with distinct morphological and adaptive characteristics in domestic sheep

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Documents

  • Fulltext

    Final published version, 3.82 MB, PDF document

  • Hong Cheng
  • Zhuangbiao Zhang
  • Jiayue Wen
  • Johannes A. Lenstra
  • Heller, Rasmus
  • Yudong Cai
  • Yingwei Guo
  • Ming Li
  • Ran Li
  • Wenrong Li
  • Sangang He
  • Jintao Wang
  • Junjie Shao
  • Yuxuan Song
  • Lei Zhang
  • Masum Billah
  • Xihong Wang
  • Mingjun Liu
  • Yu Jiang

The worldwide sheep population comprises more than 1000 breeds. Together, these exhibit a considerable morphological diversity, which has not been extensively investigated at the molecular level. Here, we analyze whole-genome sequencing individuals of 1,098 domestic sheep from 154 breeds, and 69 wild sheep from seven Ovis species. On average, we detected 6.8%, 1.0% and 0.2% introgressed sequence in domestic sheep originating from Iranian mouflon, urial and argali, respectively, with rare introgressions from other wild species. Interestingly, several introgressed haplotypes contributed to the morphological differentiations across sheep breeds, such as a RXFP2 haplotype from Iranian mouflon conferring the spiral horn trait, a MSRB3 haplotype from argali strongly associated with ear morphology, and a VPS13B haplotype probably originating from urial and mouflon possibly associated with facial traits. Our results reveal that introgression events from wild Ovis species contributed to the high rate of morphological differentiation in sheep breeds, but also to individual variation within breeds. We propose that long divergent haplotypes are a ubiquitous source of phenotypic variation that allows adaptation to a variable environment, and that these remain intact in the receiving population probably due to reduced recombination.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere1010615
JournalPLOS Genetics
Volume19
Issue number2
Number of pages27
ISSN1553-7390
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Cheng et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

ID: 338528652