Reducing the Incidence of Early Embryonic Mortality in Beef Cattle

Abstract Text: Putative loss of function (LOF) alleles that are never seen as homozygotes despite their allele frequency suggesting that they should be seen are strongly implicated as being lethal. For this approach to lead to effective strategies for the improvement of fertility, there must be a relatively large number of recessive embryonic lethal alleles which due to natural selection will be individually at low frequency within the target population.  In order to identify putative LOF alleles we have re-sequenced >100 bovine genomes to an average of >20x depth of coverage and characterized the resulting variants.  These variants will be used to design a genotyping assay that we will use to genotype ~10,000 Angus heifers to identify, validate and characterize the impact of recessive lethal alleles associated with reproductive failure in Angus cattle.

Keywords: beef cattle, genome sequence, fertility