Table 1.
Overview of tail categories in sheep and pigs used in the comparative genomic analyses.
Table 2.
GWAS peak loci associated with tail length in sheep and pigs.
Fig 1.
WGS-based GWAS results for tail length (TL) presented as Manhattan plots.
(A) Sheep: 320 markers exceeded the suggestive threshold, but none reached the Bonferroni threshold. (B) Pigs: 34 markers exceeded the suggestive threshold, and one locus on SSC18:7,836,326 surpassed the Bonferroni threshold.
Table 3.
GWAS peak loci associated with tail abnormalities, including axis deviation (AXISD) and wedged vertebrae (WDGV) in sheep, and tail kink (Kink) in pigs.
Table 4.
Conserved genomic windows harboring common genes with predicted functional SNPs across species.
Fig 2.
Conserved and species-specific elements in GWAS loci for tail length in sheep and pigs.
Manhattan plots labeled with conserved and species-specific elements identified within genomic windows of GWAS loci for tail length in sheep (A) and pigs (B). The genomic window of the suggestive locus on OAR4:107,294,668 in sheep and the significant locus on SSC18:7,836,326 in pigs are conserved, harboring 6 putatively functional common genes. Eight species-specific putative functional candidate genes were identified on OAR11, OAR21, and OAR23 in sheep, and 5 species-specific putative functional candidate genes on SSC1, SSC10, and SSC16 in pigs.
Table 5.
Genotype distributions of short tail (S) and long tail (L) group animals for putative functional candidate variants near TL GWAS loci in sheep and pigs.
Table 6.
Genotype distributions of tail abnormality (TA) and normal tail (NT) group animals for putative functional candidate variants near TA GWAS loci in sheep and pigs.
Fig 3.
Species-specific candidate genes in GWAS loci for tail abnormalities in sheep and pigs.
Manhattan plots labeled with species-specific putative functional candidate genes identified within genomic windows of GWAS loci for axis deviation (A) and wedged vertebrae (B) in sheep, and tail kink (C) in pigs. No conserved genomic window was detected for tail abnormalities across species. Three candidate genes were identified on OAR6 for axis deviation, one on OAR25 for wedged vertebrae in sheep, and three on SSC2 for tail kink in pigs.
Table 7.
Pathways enriched in candidate genes associated with tail traits in sheep and pigs.
Fig 4.
GeneMANIA diagrams illustrating interactions among the putative functional candidate genes (central nodes) and their neighboring genes (outer nodes) for tail traits in sheep (A) and pigs (B).
Fig 5.
Comparison of GO enrichment analysis of candidate genes for tail traits in sheep and pigs.
Bars indicate the percentage of candidate genes mapped to each GO category.