Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for cattle stature identifies common genes that regulate body size in mammals.

Aniek C Bouwman, Hans D Daetwyler, Amanda J Chamberlain, Carla Hurtado Ponce, Mehdi Sargolzaei, Flavio S Schenkel, Goutam Sahana, Armelle Govignon-Gion, Simon Boitard, Marlies Dolezal, Hubert Pausch, Rasmus F Brøndum, Phil J Bowman, Bo Thomsen, Bernt Guldbrandtsen, Mogens S Lund, Bertrand Servin, Dorian J Garrick, James Reecy, Johanna Vilkki, Alessandro Bagnato, Min Wang, Jesse L Hoff, Robert D Schnabel, Jeremy F Taylor, Anna A E Vinkhuyzen, Frank Panitz, Christian Bendixen, Lars-Erik Holm, Birgit Gredler, Chris Hozé, Mekki Boussaha, Marie-Pierre Sanchez, Dominique Rocha, Aurélien Capitan, Thierry Tribout, Anne Barbat, Pascal Croiseau, Cord Drögemüller, Vidhya Jagannathan, Christy Vander Jagt, John J Crowley, Anna Bieber, Deirdre C Purfield, Donagh P Berry, Reiner Emmerling, Kay-Uwe Götz, Mirjam Frischknecht, Ingolf Russ, Johann Sölkner, Curtis P Van Tassell, Ruedi Fries, Paul Stothard, Roel F Veerkamp, Didier Boichard, Mike E Goddard, Ben J Hayes
March 2018
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Abstract

Stature is affected by many polymorphisms of small effect in humans. In contrast, variation in dogs, even within breeds, has been suggested to be largely due to variants in a small number of genes. Here we use data from cattle to compare the genetic architecture of stature to those in humans and dogs. We conducted a meta-analysis for stature using 58,265 cattle from 17 populations with 25.4 million imputed whole-genome sequence variants. Results showed that the genetic architecture of stature in cattle is similar to that in humans, as the lead variants in 163 significantly associated genomic regions (P textless 5 × 10) explained at most 13.8% of the phenotypic variance. Most of these variants were noncoding, including variants that were also expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) and in ChIP-seq peaks. There was significant overlap in loci for stature with humans and dogs, suggesting that a set of common genes regulates body size in mammals.

Type
Journal article
Publication
Nat Genet