The genome-wide structure of two economically important indigenous Sicilian cattle breeds1

Genomic technologies, such as high- throughput genotyping based on SNP arrays, provided background information concerning genome structure in domestic animals. The aim of this work was to inves- tigate the genetic structure, the genome-wide estimates of inbreeding, coancestry, effective population size (N e ), and the patterns of linkage disequilibrium (LD) in 2 eco- nomically important Sicilian local cattle breeds, Cinisara (CIN) and Modicana (MOD), using the Illumina Bovine SNP50K v2 BeadChip. To understand the genetic rela- tionship and to place both Sicilian breeds in a global context, genotypes from 134 other domesticated bovid breeds were used. Principal component analysis showed that…