The 50K genotypes of 2,935 animals from the 5 most common temperate beef breeds in Australia
were used to identify genomic footprints of selection based on fixation index (FST). A principal
component analysis on genomic relationships between all individuals showed that Angus, Hereford
and Wagyu are the most genetically differentiated breeds. Therefore, 3 pairwise FST comparisons
were implemented between Angus vs. Wagyu, Angus vs. Hereford and Hereford vs. Wagyu.
Genome-wide comparison of patterns of the FST values revealed 14 candidate regions under
selection on chromosomes 2:6, 8, 12, 13, 20, and 24. Several of the identified candidate regions in
this study have been previously reported for different economically important traits in beef cattle.
In addition, our identified candidate regions for signatures of selection harboured genes in several
enriched annotation clusters. If validated, the results from this study can be incorporated in genomic
selection of the Australian beef cattle population.