Caprine Genome Analysis Reveals Valuable Insights into Selection of Enhanced Phenotypic Traits to Enable Improved Goat Breeding Programs

Abstract

Sheep and goat breeds are selected worldwide for meat, wool and dairy production, and breeding objectives also include improving other functional phenotypic traits such as reproductive performance and disease resistance. The advent of next-generation sequencing technology in 2007 facilitated the subsequent de novo sequencing of sheep (Jiang et al., 2014) and goat genomes (Dong et al., 2013). In turn, this offered an opportunity to create high-density single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) DNA microarrays. Genomic studies in small ruminants were first possible in 2009 with the development of the 50K ovine SNP chip (Kijas et al., 2009