Identification of Deleterious Alleles in Poultry

Description

Small effective population sizes of livestock can lead to deleterious recessive alleles drifting more rapidly to higher frequencies, impacting production and animal welfare. The unpredictable impact on phenotype, and relative rarity of causal mutations can make such variation difficult to select against. We have developed a generic pipeline to identify genomic regions with missing homozygosity that combines genotype, phenotype and whole-genome sequencing data. The procedure aims to detect lethal recessive haplotypes, estimate the effect on the phenotype, and to identify the potential candidates for the causal mutation in any given population. The analysis pipeline was used on a dataset comprised of 22.000 birds from seven layer lines, genotyped with the 60K Illumina SNP array. This enabled the identification of multiple potential lethal recessive haplotypes in these lines. For three of the lines genome sequence data is available for 270 individuals, which are currently being used for the identification of likely causal mutations for the observed lethal effects.

Period	15 Jan 2017
Event title	The Plant and Animal Genome XXIIV Conference (PAG)
Event type	Conference/symposium
Location	San Diego, United StatesShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International