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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 < 5 x 10-8) 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.
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1 Animal Breeding and Genomics Centre, Wageningen UR Livestock Research, Wageningen, the Netherlands
2 AgriBio, Centre for AgriBioscience, Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources, Bundoora, Victoria, Australia
3 School of Applied Systems Biology, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria, Australia
4 Faculty of Land and Food Resources, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia
5 Centre for Genetic Improvement of Livestock, Department of Animal Biosciences, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada