Copy number variations (CNV) are an important source of genetic variation. CNV has been increasingly studied and frequently associated with diseases and productive traits in livestock animals. However, CNV‐based genome‐wide association studies (GWAS) in Santa Inês sheep, one of the principal sheep breeds in Brazil, have not yet been reported. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate the association between CNV and growth, efficiency and carcass traits in sheep. The Illumina OvineSNP50 BeadChip array was used to detect CNV in 491 Santa Inês individuals. Then, CNV‐based GWAS was performed with a linear mixed model approach considering a genomic relationship matrix, for ten traits: (1) growth: body weight at three (W3) and six (W6) months of age; (2) efficiency: residual feed intake (RFI) and feed efficiency (FE) and (3) carcass: external carcass length (ECL), leg length (LL), carcass yield (CY), commercial cuts weight (CCW), loin eye area (LEA) and subcutaneous fat thickness (SFT). We identified 1,167 autosomal CNV in 438 sheep, with 294 non‐redundant CNV, ranging from 21.8 to 861.9 kb, merged into 216 distinct copy number variation regions (CNVRs). One significant CNV segment (pFDR‐value<0.05) in OAR3 was associated with CY, while another significant CNV in OAR6 was associated with RFI. Additionally, another 5 CNV segments were considered relevant for investigation in the future studies. The significant segments overlapped 4 QTLs and spanned 8 genes, including the SPAST,TGFA and ADGRL3 genes, involved in cell differentiation and energy metabolism. Therefore, the results of the present study increase knowledge about CNV in sheep, their possible impacts on productive traits, and provide information for future investigations, being especially useful for those interested in structural variations in the sheep genome.

The present study aimed to estimate covariance components of milk fatty acids (FA) and to compare the genomic estimated breeding values under general and heat-stress effects. Data consisted of 38,762 test-day records from 6,344 Holstein cows obtained from May 2012 through January 2018 on 4 dairy herds from Brazil. Single-trait repeatability test-day models with random regressions as a function of temperature-humidity index values were used for genetic analyses. The models included contemporary groups, parity order (1-6), and days in milk classes as fixed effects, and general and thermotolerance additive genetic and permanent environmental as random effects. Notably, differences in heritability estimates between environments (general and heat stress) increased (0.03 to 0.06) for unsaturated FA traits, such as unsaturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated, at higher heat-stress levels. In contrast, heritability estimated between environments for saturated FA traits, including saturated FA, palmitic acid (C16:0), and stearic acid (C18:0) did not observe significant differences between environments. In addition, our study revealed negative genetic correlations between general and heat-stress additive genetic effects (antagonistic effect) for the saturated FA, C16:0, C18:0, and C18:1, which ranged from −0.007 to −0.32. Spearman's ranking correlation between genomic estimated breeding values ranged from −0.27 to 0.99. Results indicated a moderate to strong interaction of genotype by the environment for most FA traits comparing a heat-stress environment with thermoneutral conditions. Our findings point out novel opportunities to explore the use of FA milk profile and heat-stress models.

No abstract