Abstract:

The previous genomewide association studies (GWAS) with Illumina Bovine50K chip have identified 35 significant SNPs associated with one or multiple milk production traits in a Chinese Holstein population from Beijing region with daughter design. The purpose of this study was to determine potential genes affecting milk yield and milk composition and function annotation based on such GWAS results. Through bioinformatics and comparative genomics analysis, potential genes screening and function prediction were performed. Twelve of 35 significant SNPs were located within genes and 23 were in the flanking region based on Btau 4.2 database. As a result, total 28 genes corresponding to the aforementioned 35 SNPs were determined. The functions of such genes were classified into 6 categories, including regulating body metabolism and nutrient balance, cytoskeleton or extracellular matrix, regulation of proliferation, cell cycle and apoptosis, cell signal transduction and saltion channel composition, kinase activity, mRNA transcription and translation regulation, transportation or transduction, transcription and translation regulation of fat granule protein. The findings could be useful for further investigations on gene identification and function validation for milk production traits in dairy cattle.