A Study on Effects of Family and Haplotype Blocks on Conservation of Gene Expression Traits in Half Sib Sheep Families

Abstract

The objective of this study was to explore the relationship between SNP and haplotype variation on gene expression traits. The data used included expression levels from 24,128 probe sets of 'logissimus lumborum' muscle from 38 half-sib Poll Dorset sheep from six families and genotypes from 49,034 SNPs collected from the same animals. The analytical approaches used sought to analyse the effects of family and haplotype blocks on conservation of gene expression traits in this sheep population. Our study indicated that there is a genetic component in gene expression traits and hence gene expression is heritable to non-negligible extent. On average, our estimated heritability for gene expression obtained from skeletal muscle samples of sheep is 0.27 and 0.29 based on two different approaches. These preliminary results are consistent with previous heritability estimates.