Dog breeding promotes within-group homogeneity through conformation to strict breed standards and also drives between-group heterogeneity in pursuit of distinct morphological forms and characteristic breed traits. In this study, the genotype-first approach was adapted to the dog genome to investigate coding variation from over 2000 dogs, leading to discoveries of new mutations related to craniofacial morphology and stature.
Breed enriched variants were prioritized according to gene constraint, which was calculated using a mutation model derived from trinucleotide substitution probabilities in the dog. Most priority variants were not associated with genomic signatures for breed differentiation, as these regions were enriched for constrained genes intolerant to nonsynonymous variation, suggesting a model of breed phenotype diversification based on regulatory changes to essential genes. Identification of trait-associated variants in dogs informs new biological roles of genes. Improved collection of breed disease risk data, along with increased breed representation, will drive further discoveries.
Overall design: Dataset containing a total of 1,742 samples of which 1,434 are reanalyzed from GSM series, GSE83160, GSE83225, GSE90441, GSE96736, GSE121027, GSE123368, GSE193384, GSE213053, GSE241367. Remaining 308 samples are of various dog breeds, processed through GenomeStudio into a PLINK format for downstream analyses.
Less...