The yak genome and adaptation to life at high altitude
By Q. Qiu, Guojie Zhang, T. Ma, W. Qian, Junyi Wang, Zhiqiang Ye, C. Cao, Quanjun Hu, Jaebum Kim, D. Larkin and 38 more. Nature Genetics, 2012
856 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Domestic yaks (Bos grunniens) provide meat and other necessities for Tibetans living at high altitude on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau and in adjacent regions. Comparison between yak and the closely related low-altitude cattle (Bos taurus) is informative in studying animal adaptation to high altitude. Here, we present the draft genome sequence of a female domestic yak generated using Illumina-based technology at 65-fold coverage. Genomic comparisons between yak and cattle identify an expansion in yak of gene families related to sensory perception and energy metabolism, as well as an enrichment of protein domains involved in sensing the extracellular environment and hypoxic stress. Positively selected and rapidly evolving genes in the yak lineage are also found to be significantly enriched in functional categories and pathways related to hypoxia and nutrition metabolism. These findings may have important implications for understanding adaptation to high altitude in other animal species and for hypoxia-related diseases in humans.
Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d8304d4a4f25515ee07fc07bf7ff6f92259c9038
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Citations in the corpus
- On the history of cattle genetic resources (2014, background): “In Tibet and surrounding regions the adaptation of the yak (Bos grunniens) to high altitudes [39] has been exploited since ca.”
- The Genome 10K Project: A Way Forward (2015, positive): “, high-altitude adaptation in the domestic yak (116)] but alsowith an emphasis onunderstanding the roleof genomic architecture and chromosomal rearrangement in genome and organismal evolution (e.”
- Review: genetic diversity of local and exotic cattle and their crossbreeding impact on the quality of Indonesian cattle. (2015, background): “In Tibet, yak cattle (Bos grunniens) had been domesticated and able to adapt to high altitudes (Qiu et al. 2012) since c.a. 4500 BP (Payne and Hodges 1997).”