Whole-genome sequence analysis unveils different origins of European and Asiatic mouflon and domestication-related genes in sheep
Chen, Ze-Hui; Xu, Ya-Xi; Xie, Xing-Long; Wang, Dong-Feng; Aguilar-Gómez, Diana; Liu, Guang-Jian; Li, Xin; Esmailizadeh, Ali; Rezaei, Vahideh; Kantanen, Juha; Ammosov, Innokentyi; Nosrati, Maryam; Periasamy, Kathiravan; Coltman, David W; Lenstra, Johannes A; Nielsen, Rasmus; Li, Meng-Hua
(2021) Communications Biology, volume 4, issue 1, pp. 1 - 15
(Article)
Abstract
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
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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.
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Keywords: Medicine (miscellaneous), General Biochemistry,Genetics and Molecular Biology, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
ISSN: 2399-3642
Publisher: Springer Nature
Note: Funding Information: This study was financially supported by grants from the National Key Research and Development Program-Key Projects of International Innovation Cooperation between Governments (2017YFE0117900), the External Cooperation Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (152111KYSB20190027), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 31661143014, 31825024, and 31972527), and the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (STEP) (No. 2019QZKK0501). We thank Ming-Shan Wang, Sheng Wang, Hua-Jing Teng, Da-Qi Yu, Peter Wilton, and Débora YC Brandt for their technical help with the statistical analysis. We express our thanks to the owners of the sheep for donating samples (Supplementary Data 1). Thanks are also due to a number of persons for their help during sample collection. Publisher Copyright: © 2021, The Author(s).
(Peer reviewed)