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

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  • 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.
OriginalsprogEngelsk
Artikelnummere1010615
TidsskriftPLOS Genetics
Vol/bind19
Udgave nummer2
Antal sider27
ISSN1553-7390
DOI
StatusUdgivet - 2023

Bibliografisk note

Funding Information:
This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U21A20247 and 31822052) Shaanxi Innovation Team Project (2022TD-10), Natural Science Basic Research Program of Shaanxi (2021JCW-11) to Y.J., Research on High-efficiency and Healthy Breeding Technology for Both Milk and Meat Sheep, the Jinchang Meat Sheep Test Demonstration Base (TGZX202137) to Y.S, and Genetic Improvement and Breeding of Xinjiang Native Sheep Breeds, Key Program of Science & Technology of Xinjiang (2022A02001-2) to M.L. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We thank the High-Performance Computing platform of Northwest A&F University for providing computing resources. We express our thanks to the owners of the sheep for providing samples (for sampling information see S2 Table).

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.

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