Genome Wide Association Study Between CNVs and Production Traits in the Italian Brown Swiss Breed

CNVs are more and more recognized as a significant source of genetic variation, driving studies that assess their impact on complex traits. A genome wide association study (GWAS) was conducted between CNVs and production traits (milk-, protein-, fat kg and somatic cell score (SCS)) in 651 bulls of the Italian Brown Swiss breed. After careful quality filtering, a total number of 1,289 CNVs were identified from the Illumina Bovine SNP50 BeadChip data with the SVS8.2.1 software (Golden Helix, Inc.), applying the univariate module. Overlapping CNVs were summarized at the population level into 277 CNVRs. A total of 11 CNVs on BTAs 2, 9, 12, 18, 20, 25 and 28 were associated with productive traits and SCC. Finally, a gene ontology (GO) and pathways analyses using the DAVID Bioinformatics Resources 6.7 was performed for CNVs resulting significantly associated with the considered traits. Comparison with other findings in another Alpine breed (Poster 16936) is also presented. This study was supported by the EC funded FP7 project "QUANTOMICS" contract n. 222664.