Distribution Of Marbling-associated SNPs In Chinese Cattle Breeds

With the high-speed development of national economy and the continuous improvement of people's living standard and the change of market demand, the breeding history of Chinese native cattle has experienced a series changes. The modern molecular technology, genomic editing and marker-assisted selection breeding can give us new opportunities for development of beef cattle breeding. Marbling characterized by the amount and distribution of intramuscular fat in a cross section of musculus longissimus muscle is one of the economically important traits of beef cattle. High levels of marbling improve the palatability and acceptability of beef by affecting the taste and tenderness of the meat. In this study, we investigated the genetic diversity of marbling-associated single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs), g.3109537C>T (RPL27A), and g.1471620G>T (EDG1) in five Chinese cattle breeds, Mongolian cattle population in Mongolia (MMG), Mongolian cattle population in Inner Mongolia (IMMG), Luxi cattle (LX), Xiangxi cattle (XX) and Guangxi cattle (GX). Furthermore, we compared the frequencies of the favorable alleles in these five cattle breeds to those of Japanese Black, Japanese Brown, Japanese short Horn, Holstein, and Brown Swiss breeds. The result suggest that the original alleles frequency distribution of each marbling-associated SNP in MMG, IMMG, LX, XX and GX breed was gradually decreases from north to south China, likely based on geographic distance. The favorable allelic frequency of each SNP in IMMG breed was higher than those of other Chinese yellow cattle breeds.