The relationship between MUC19 copy number variation and growth traits of Chinese cattle

Copy number variation (CNV), as one of the important variations in the biological genome, refers to the deletion and duplication of genomic segments between 1 kb and 50 kb caused by genomic rearrangements. Currently, many copy number variations have been found to be significantly associated with important economic traits such as growth, development and reproduction of cattle. However, the study of MUC19 gene has not been reported. In this study, we detected an appropriate correlation between MUC19 gene and growth traits of Chinese cattle. We detected the distribution of MUC19-CNV across Qinchuan cattle (QC), Pinan cattle (PN), Xianan cattle (XN), Yunling cattle (YL), Guyuan cattle (GY), Jiaxian cattle (JX), and analyzed the association between types of MUC19-CNV and growth traits through SPSS20.0 software and method of ANOVA. The results showed that various types of CNV were present in each breed of cattle, but there were discrepancies in the distribution of copy number variant types. The Association analysis result showed that CNV of MUC19 gene showed a postive effect in cattle growth traits: the copy number of MUC19 was significantly correlated with hip width of PN cattle (P < 0.01), height at hip cross and withers height of PN cattle (P < 0.05), hip width and body length of JX cattle (P < 0.05), Huckle bone width of YL cattle (P < 0.05).