Angus Genome Project

Just three short years ago the 1000 Genomes Project was launched with the objective to catalogue all the common genetic variation in the human population.  Continued advances in sequencing and genotyping technology, the completion of a draft bovine genome sequence and rapid industry adoption of genomic technologies have combined to offer an opportunity to position cattle as the next mammalian “model genome.”  To this end, we have begun re-sequencing the genomes of Angus bulls that have large numbers of progeny with economically important phenotypes and which have already been genotyped using the BovineSNP50 assay.  We will briefly discuss an analysis pipeline we have developed and present results demonstrating the capacity to rapidly identify candidate causal mutations from genome re-sequence data.  Our objective is to make these candidate causal mutation publicly available as a resource to the community so that they can be tested for causality in independent populations.