Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
Today, cows aren't getting pregnant as easily as before, leading to issues like reduced milk production, smaller herds, increased reproductive costs, and sometimes the need to cull animals. While genetics plays a moderate role in cow fertility, enhancing the genetic aspect of reproduction could be cost-effective and more sustainable in the long term. The overall goal of this project is to identify the genes and mutations associated with cow fertility and utilize this knowledge to enhance their reproductive success. The specific aims are to: 1) conduct a large-scale study involving millions of cows to identify candidate genes linked to fertility, 2) identify the genetic variations influencing fertility by analyzing functional genomics data, and 3) select a group of fertility-related variants to aid in animal breeding decisions. This project represents the largest study of cattle fertility to date and is expected to significantly impact dairy profitability and animal welfare. By utilizing the US dairy genomics database, this investigation will deepen our understanding of cattle reproduction genetics and assist in the selection of superior cows.
Animal Health Component
10%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
50%
Applied
50%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
The overall goal is to discover causal/tightly linked genetic variants and apply the genomic discoveries to improve fertility. The specific aims are to 1) identify genomic regions and candidate genes associated with cattle fertility with million-sample genome-wide association study in multiple cattle breeds, 2) fine-map causal/tightly linked variants of fertility by integrating sequence-level GWAS and various functional genomics data, and 3) select a set of fertility variants to optimize genomic selection of reproductive performance.
Project Methods
The goal of the research is to identify causal/tightly linked variants and genomic regions of cattle fertility that can be readily applied to genomic selection, using a full range of large-scale genomic and functional genomic analyses. Four major projects will be conducted, including an initial big-data GWAS analyses of seven million cows with 80K SNPs and 21 PTA phenotypes, a sequence-level GWAS of ~60K reference bulls from four dairy breeds, a fine-mapping analysis with various functional genomics data including CattleGTEx, FAANG, and other omics data, and selection and validation of candidate fertility variants to optimize genomic selection of cattle reproductive performance.