Rute da Fonseca

In this collaboration with Catarina Ginja from CIBIO, we sequenced 48 genomes belonging to eight Iberian native breeds and found that, despite having been established less than 200 years ago and sharing a relative small geographical area, the individual breeds are genetically very distinct with FST values ranging from 4 to 16%. They also show levels of nucleotide diversity similar or larger than those of their European counterparts, namely Jersey and Holstein. All eight breeds display significant gene flow or admixture from African taurine cattle and include mtDNA and Y-chromosome haplotypes from multiple origins. Furthermore, we detected a very low differentiation of chromosome X relative to autosomes within all analyzed taurine breeds, potentially reflecting male-biased gene flow.  This work was published in BMC Genomics.