Identification of Epistatic Interactions Among Fatty Acid Traits, in Angus Sired Beef Cattle

Abstract Text: Previously, we reported the identification of genomic regions associated with variation in fatty acid composition of beef. In this study, we use the same animal population to identify epistatic interactions that are associated with variation in fatty acid composition. EpiSNP was utilized to evaluate all pairwise SNP comparisons for additive and dominance interactions. After filtering for a minimum of 5 animals per genotype combination and only SNP interactions that spanned chromosomes, 9274 interactions with a FDR > 0.05 and 378 interactions after Bonferonni correction (adj p< 0.05) were detected. Additive by additive interactions were the predominant epistatic effect detected. Interestingly, large numbers of interactions were observed between chromosomes 6 and 14, 9 and 20, and 5, 14, and 23. These results indicate that a number of epistatic interactions might control some of the variation in fatty acid composition.

Keywords: Epistatic Interaction, Beef Cattle, Fatty Acids