Genome of the extinct Gotland cattle breed

The extinct cattle breed Gotland cattle lived on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea until the beginning of the 1950s. We sequenced the genomes of two Gotland cattle isolated from skulls from a local museum on Gotland.

The depth of coverage was 2.7X and 3.3X, respectively, with a breadth of coverage of 85% and 89%. Based on coverage of the sex chromosomes, both animals appeared to be female. We detected 19 million single nucleotide variants and 2.8 million indels in the joint dataset of Gotland cattle jointly called with modern Swedish cattle. In a principal component analysis, the two Gotland cattle placed the closest to Swedish Red cattle, rather than among the southern or northern traditional breeds. In terms of mitochondrial haplotypes, they were similar to clusters of related haplotypes involving multiple other breeds, including Swedish Mountain cattle, Swedish Red Polled and several Finnish cattle breeds.

In summary, our results suggest that Gotland cattle were genetically closer to the ancestors of Swedish Red cattle than to the extant traditional Swedish breeds.