Genome-wide association analysis for temperament in Australian sheep

In livestock, temperament traits such as flight speed and agitation are important indicators of management, survival, and welfare. Multiple studies have reported a low to moderate heritability for these traits. Identifying the genomic regions associated with temperament could help to find candidate genes and processes involved in defining these traits and this could be helpful in genomic prediction of phenotype or breeding value. This study aimed to identify genomic regions associated with flight speed and agitation. We used imputed whole-genome sequences from animals with records for flight speed (n = 8,737) and agitation (n = 8,586). The heritability for agitation was 0.18 ± 0.03 and 0.14 ± 0.02 for flight speed respectively. Three and five QTL regions were associated with agitation (on Chr3, Chr4, and Chr20) and flight speed (on Chr 1, Chr13, Chr15, and Chr26), respectively. The identification of these genomic regions provides further knowledge on the genetic mechanism involved in temperament traits providing alternative tools to improve sheep breeding programs. Further analysis is needed to find links between agitation and flight speed with production traits.