11:10 AM - 11:20 AM
[IX29-14] Integrating functional genomic information to improve the accuracy of genomic selection of dairy cattle
Genotype plus Environment (GplusE) is a five-year long European Union project aimed at identifying genetic and biological markers related to phenotypes of interest in dairy cows and developing new breeding and management schemes to achieve environmentally sustainable as well as profitable dairy cow production. As part of the project, we performed expression quantitative trait loci analyses (eQTL) using liver and whole blood total RNA sequencing data collected from ~200 Holstein cows. We identified ~34,000 and ~7,000 DNA variants affecting gene in expression in cis and trans, respectively. We applied an assay for transposase-accessible chromatin using sequencing (ATAC-seq) method to 13 tissues from an infant male Holstein. We could profile on average ~160,000 putative regulatory elements per tissue on the cow genome. We will discuss how the generated eQTL and ATAC-seq information is used to identify causative DNA variants in genome-wide association study (GWAS) regions and improve the accuracy of genomic selection.