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. 2022 Sep 26;17(1):1269-1281.
doi: 10.1515/biol-2022-0487. eCollection 2022.

Discovery of exercise-related genes and pathway analysis based on comparative genomes of Mongolian originated Abaga and Wushen horse

Jing Pan  1   2 , Chimge Purev  3 , Hongwei Zhao  4 , Zhipeng Zhang  1 , Feng Wang  5 , Nashun Wendoule  6 , Guichun Qi  7 , Yongbin Liu  8 , Huanmin Zhou  1   8
Affiliations

Discovery of exercise-related genes and pathway analysis based on comparative genomes of Mongolian originated Abaga and Wushen horse

Jing Pan et al. Open Life Sci. .

Abstract

The Mongolian horses have excellent endurance and stress resistance to adapt to the cold and harsh plateau conditions. Intraspecific genetic diversity is mainly embodied in various genetic advantages of different branches of the Mongolian horse. Since people pay progressive attention to the athletic performance of horse, we expect to guide the exercise-oriented breeding of horses through genomics research. We obtained the clean data of 630,535,376,400 bp through the entire genome second-generation sequencing for the whole blood of four Abaga horses and ten Wushen horses. Based on the data analysis of single nucleotide polymorphism, we severally detected that 479 and 943 positively selected genes, particularly exercise related, were mainly enriched on equine chromosome 4 in Abaga horses and Wushen horses, which implied that chromosome 4 may be associated with the evolution of the Mongolian horse and athletic performance. Four hundred and forty genes of positive selection were enriched in 12 exercise-related pathways and narrowed in 21 exercise-related genes in Abaga horse, which were distinguished from Wushen horse. So, we speculated that the Abaga horse may have oriented genes for the motorial mechanism and 21 exercise-related genes also provided a molecular genetic basis for exercise-directed breeding of the Mongolian horse.

Keywords: Mongolian horse; athletic performance; exercise; genome.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interest: Authors state no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
SNP following SNP calling. High quality SNPs were evaluated and identified. AB and WS indicate Abaga horse and Wushen horse, respectively.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Identification of selected regions in Abaga horse and Wushen horse. (a) To identify potential selective sweeps between Abaga horse (fast) and Wushen horse (slow), log2(πslow/πfast) and FST were calculated together using VCFtools with a 20 kb sliding window and a step size of 10 kb. Windows that contained less than ten SNPs were excluded from further analysis. The windows that were simultaneously (1) in the top 5% of Z-transformed FST values and (2) in the bottom 5% log2(πfast/πslow) were considered to be candidates selective regions in Abaga horse. (b) The same applies to the Wushen horse.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Distribution of selected genes on chromosomes.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Function analysis based on GO: (a) the most enriched GO terms in Abaga horse and (b) the most enriched GO terms in Wushen horse.
Figure 5
Figure 5
The KEGG pathway enrichment analysis: (a) top 20 of enriched pathways by statistics in Abaga horse and (b) top 20 enriched pathways by statistics in Wushen horse.
Figure 6
Figure 6
The exercise-related candidate genes and pathways of Abaga horse.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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