Johnsson, Martin
- Department of Animal Biosciences, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Abstract
Background The extinct cattle breed Gotland cattle lived on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea until the beginning of the 1950s. We sequenced the genomes of two Gotland cattle isolated from skulls from a local museum on Gotland. Results The depth of coverage was 2.7X and 3.3X, respectively, with a breadth of coverage of 85% and 89%. Based on coverage of the sex chromosomes, both animals appeared to be female. We detected 19 million single nucleotide variants and 2.8 million indels in the joint dataset of Gotland cattle jointly called with modern Swedish cattle. In a principal component analysis, the two Gotland cattle placed the closest to Swedish Red cattle, rather than among the southern or northern traditional breeds. In terms of mitochondrial haplotypes, they were similar to clusters of related haplotypes involving multiple other breeds, including Swedish Mountain cattle, Swedish Red Polled and several Finnish cattle breeds. Conclusions In summary, our results suggest that Gotland cattle were genetically closer to the ancestors of Swedish Red cattle than to the extant traditional Swedish breeds.
Keywords
Cattle; Historical DNA; Extinct breeds
Published in
BMC Genomics
2025, volume: 26, number: 1, article number: 1093
SLU Authors
Johansson, Anna Maria
- Department of Animal Biosciences, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
- Department of Animal Biosciences, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
UKÄ Subject classification
Genetics and Breeding in Agricultural Sciences
Publication identifier
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-025-12382-3
Permanent link to this page (URI)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/145036