Mahdi Mokhber - Department of animal science, Faculty of Agriculture, Urmia University, Urmia, Iran

A genome-wide association study (GWAS) was carried out on Iranian water buffaloes with the objective of detecting genomic regions associated with some morphological traits. For this propos, a set of 376 water buffalo with phenotypic data from Azeri (N=246), Khuzestani (N=109) and Mazandarani (N=20) breeds were genotyped with Axiom® Buffalo Genotyping Array which contains 89,988 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers. Detecting genomic regions that associated with type traits was done using GenABEL package in R. In total, 8, 9, 9, 5, 7, 5, 12, 8 and 7genomic regions were detected that maybe associated with body length (BL), heart girth (HG - represented the circumference of the chest just behind the forelimbs), chest depth (CD), height-at-withers (HAW), and hip width (HIW), pin width (PW), hip to pin length (HP) and head size (HS) and horn length (HL) morphological traits, respectively. Annotation of these regions using the UMD3.1 Bostaurus Genome Assembly was performed to find putative candidate genes within the selected regions. Among the candidate genes identified in these regions GRB10, EGR1, ACAT2, SLC25A25, NRP1, FOXC2 and ABR genes are related to biological cell growth pathways and BMP2K, EGR1, CCIN, FRMPD1, ARPC5L, DNM1, FOXC2, ABR and MPP1 are related skeletal bone development biological pathways such as bone mineralization. Further investigation of these regions with additional data is necessary to confirm the associations and fine-map the QTL regions.

Genome wide association study, single nucleotide polymorphisms, Azeri, Khuzestaniand Mazandrani buffalo breeds.