Genetic position of Hungarian Grey among European cattle and identification of breed-specific markers

Hungarian Grey is an indigenous cattle breed that is one of the national symbols of Hungary. However, genetic description of the Hungarian Grey cattle has not yet been conducted based on whole-genome screening. Using the GeneSeek high-density Bovine SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) 150 K BeadChip, we sampled the genome of 36 Hungarian Grey, 12 Maremmana, 13 Hungarian Fleckvieh and 5 Holstein-Friesian cattle for population studies and used data of 139 other cattle from an additional dataset created on European cattle breeds (Upadhyay et al.2017. Heredity 118, 169-176). The performance of a multidimensional scaling plot showed that Hungarian Grey clustered independently from other European cattle. The number and total length of runs of homozygosity (ROH) is similar or slightly below the value of other European cattle; FROH coefficients (proportion of the autosomal genome covered by ROH) are similar to Maremmana and Maronesa. The frequency of ROH does not show increased values as it can be noticed in Heck and Maltese. These results indicate that the Hungarian Grey cattle have been successfully maintained avoiding negative genetic effects, and reflect the uniqueness among European cattle. The identification of breed-specific loci has been aimed at differentiating Hungarian Grey (n = 136 in this case) from other cattle breeds (n = 169). Ten loci (-log10P > 5) were identified as markers capable for differentiation of Hungarian Grey. These markers are located on chromosomes 6, 14, 15, 16, 20 and 24.