Exercise-related genes analysis of Mongolian Horse - Abaga horse and Wushen horse

The Mongolian horses, as a neglected scientific resource, have excellent endurance and stress resistance to adapt to the cold and harsh plateau conditions. Intraspecific genetic diversity is mainly embodied in various genetic advantages of different branches of Mongolian horse. Abaga horse is better than Wushen horse in running speed, for example. Because people pay progressively attention to the athletic performance of horse, such as horse racing in Mongolias Naadam festival, we expect to guide the exercise-oriented breeding of horses through genomics research. We obtained the clean data of 630,535,376,400 bp through the entire genome second-generation sequencing for the whole blood of 4 Abaga horses and 10 Wushen horses. Based on the data analysis of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), we severally detected that 479 and 943 positively selected genes, particularly exercise-related, were mainly enriched on equine chromosome 4 in Abaga horses and Wushen horses, which implied that the chromosome 4 may be associated with the evolution of the Mongolian horse and athletic performance. Four hundred and forty genes of positive selection were enriched in 12 exercise-related pathways and narrowed in 21 exercise-related genes in Abaga horse, which were distinguished from Wushen horse. So, we speculated that the Abaga horse may have oriented genes for the motorial mechanism and 21 exercise-related genes also provided molecular genetic basis for exercise-directed breeding of Mongolian horse.