Evidence of Natural Selection Footprints Among Some African Chicken Breeds and Village Ecotypes

Abstract

and Implications In Africa, where general breeding and vaccination programs for chickens are absent, natural selection is a major factor in shaping genetic variation for adaptation to abiotic and biotic environmental stressors, e.g. heat, high altitude and disease. In this study two groups of chicken populations adapted to two different environments (North-African, and West-African), in addition to a synthetic commercial breed (Kuroiler), were genomically compared. Genomic comparison using SNPs between such unselected populations and the selected and genetically improved commercial one will likely result in detection of natural selection footprints and genes responsible for adaptation traits. This information may assist improving commercial lines to be more tolerant/resistant under expected climate change. Knowledge of genes involved in immunity and disease resistance could be utilized for genome selection and lessen the utilization of antibiotics which will increase chicken meat/egg quality for American consumers.

3D organization of chicken genome demonstrates evolutionary conservation to extreme environments

“…In support of this idea, heterogeneity of cancer cells could contribute to more diverse 3D genomes and increase the detected TAD numbers when compared with normal cells (Franke et al, 2016). We also characterized the TAD boundaries, and obtained most of the same TAD boundaries between two cells, which further confirmed accumulated tiny but not sharp genomic genetic variations that contributed to extreme environment adaption (Elbeltagy et al, 2017;Fleming et al, 2017;Zhang et al, 2018b). More studies of 3D chicken genomes will further elucidate the relationship between genome alterations and 3D genome organization.…”