0000000001055366
AUTHOR
M. Occidente
Genome-wide analysis of Italian sheep diversity reveals a strong geographic pattern and cryptic relationships between breeds
Summary Italy counts several sheep breeds, arisen over centuries as a consequence of ancient and recent genetic and demographic events. To finely reconstruct genetic structure and relationships between Italian sheep, 496 subjects from 19 breeds were typed at 50K single nucleotide polymorphism loci. A subset of foreign breeds from the Sheep HapMap dataset was also included in the analyses. Genetic distances (as visualized either in a network or in a multidimensional scaling analysis of identical by state distances) closely reflected geographic proximity between breeds, with a clear north–south gradient, likely because of high levels of past gene flow and admixture all along the peninsula. Sa…
The influence of age at slaughter and litter size on some quality traits of kid meat
Abstract To study variations in the carcass characteristics of Girgentana kids slaughtered at 25 or 35 days of age and litter size (single or twin), 27 male kids were slaughtered and body components, carcass joints, pelvic limb tissue composition, meat fatty acid composition and M. longissimus dorsi (LD) colour were evaluated. Girgentana kids slaughtered at 35 days had greater live weights (6.4 kg versus 5.0 kg; P ≤0.01), carcass weights (4.5 kg versus 3.6 kg; P ≤0.01), muscle contents (57.6% versus 54.9%; P ≤0.01) but similar dressing percentages (70.1% versus 70.6%) as compared to kids slaughtered at 25 days. Twin kids had a higher muscle percentage (57.3% versus 55.2%; P ≤0.05) and simil…
A first comparative map of copy number variations in the sheep genome.
article i nfo We carried out a cross species cattle-sheep array comparative genome hybridization experiment to identify copy number variations (CNVs) in the sheep genome analysing ewes of Italian dairy or dual-purpose breeds (Bagnolese, Comisana, Laticauda, Massese, Sarda, and Valle del Belice) using a tiling oligonucleotide array with ~385,000 probes designed on the bovine genome. We identified 135 CNV regions (CNVRs; 24 reported in more than one animal) covering ~10.5 Mb of the virtual sheep genome referred to the bovine genome (0.398%) with a mean and a median equal to 77.6 and 55.9 kb, respectively. A comparative analysis between the identified sheep CNVRs and those reported in cattle a…