Whole-genome sequence analysis unveils different origins of European and Asiatic mouflon and domestication-related genes in sheep

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Documents

  • Fulltext

    Final published version, 2.69 MB, PDF document

  • Ze-Hui Chen
  • Ya-Xi Xu
  • Xing-Long Xie
  • Dong-Feng Wang
  • Diana Aguilar-Gómez
  • Guang-Jian Liu
  • Xin Li
  • Ali Esmailizadeh
  • Vahideh Rezaei
  • Juha Kantanen
  • Innokentyi Ammosov
  • Maryam Nosrati
  • Kathiravan Periasamy
  • David W. Coltman
  • Johannes A. Lenstra
  • Nielsen, Rasmus
  • Meng-Hua Li

The domestication and subsequent development of sheep are crucial events in the history of human civilization and the agricultural revolution. However, the impact of interspecific introgression on the genomic regions under domestication and subsequent selection remains unclear. Here, we analyze the whole genomes of domestic sheep and their wild relative species. We found introgression from wild sheep such as the snow sheep and its American relatives (bighorn and thinhorn sheep) into urial, Asiatic and European mouflons. We observed independent events of adaptive introgression from wild sheep into the Asiatic and European mouflons, as well as shared introgressed regions from both snow sheep and argali into Asiatic mouflon before or during the domestication process. We revealed European mouflons might arise through hybridization events between a now extinct sheep in Europe and feral domesticated sheep around 6000–5000 years BP. We also unveiled later introgressions from wild sheep to their sympatric domestic sheep after domestication. Several of the introgression events contain loci with candidate domestication genes (e.g., PAPPA2, NR6A1, SH3GL3, RFX3 and CAMK4), associated with morphological, immune, reproduction or production traits (wool/meat/milk). We also detected introgression events that introduced genes related to nervous response (NEURL1), neurogenesis (PRUNE2), hearing ability (USH2A), and placental viability (PAG11 and PAG3) into domestic sheep and their ancestral wild species from other wild species.

Original languageEnglish
Article number1307
JournalCommunications Biology
Volume4
Number of pages15
ISSN2399-3642
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).

Number of downloads are based on statistics from Google Scholar and www.ku.dk


No data available

ID: 286310740