Dominic Wright
Assistant Professor, Linköping UnversityLinköping University
IFM Dept of Biology
AVIAN Behavioural Genomics and Physiology
Linköping University
Linköping, 58183
Sweden
Abstracts (first author)
A sexual ornament in chickens is determined by large-effect pleiotropic alleles at HAO1 and BMP2, selected during domestication
Summary:
The genetic analysis of phenotypes and the identification of the causative underlying genes remains central to molecular and evolutionary biology. By utilizing the domestication process it is possible to exploit the large differences between domesticated animals and their wild counterparts to study both this and the mechanism of domestication itself. Domestication itself is characterized by strong directional selection, which can leave putative signatures of this selection present in the genome in the form of reduced heterozygosity (referred to as selective sweeps). We have generated multiple intercrosses and advanced intercrosses based on wild-derived and domestic chickens to fine-map genomic regions (or QTL) affecting a sexual ornament (one to less than 400kb in size). These regions have been over-laid with putative selective sweeps identified in domestic chickens (each approximately 40kb in length), and found to be significantly associated with them. By using expression QTL analysis, we show that two genes in the 400kb region, HAO1 and BMP2, are controlling multiple aspects of the domestication phenotype, from a sexual ornament to multiple life-history traits. Resequencing of these animals reveals four differentially-fixed polymorphisms between the parental lines exist in strongly conserved regions within the selective sweep present within this region, which are candidate causative QTN. This study demonstrates the potential for large-effect mutations in domestication, as well as the use of selective sweeps to identify putative QTN in such instances.