Current Biology
Volume 27, Issue 13, 10 July 2017, Pages 2029-2035.e5
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Y Chromosome Uncovers the Recent Oriental Origin of Modern Stallions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.05.086Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Y chromosomes of modern horse breeds arose from a single ancestor after domestication

  • Sex-biased selection increased a few Oriental-derived Y chromosome lineages

  • English Thoroughbred founder stallions can be traced back to a Turkoman origin

Summary

The Y chromosome directly reflects male genealogies, but the extremely low Y chromosome sequence diversity in horses has prevented the reconstruction of stallion genealogies [1, 2]. Here, we resolve the first Y chromosome genealogy of modern horses by screening 1.46 Mb of the male-specific region of the Y chromosome (MSY) in 52 horses from 21 breeds. Based on highly accurate pedigree data, we estimated the de novo mutation rate of the horse MSY and showed that various modern horse Y chromosome lineages split much later than the domestication of the species. Apart from few private northern European haplotypes, all modern horse breeds clustered together in a roughly 700-year-old haplogroup that was transmitted to Europe by the import of Oriental stallions. The Oriental horse group consisted of two major subclades: the Original Arabian lineage and the Turkoman horse lineage. We show that the English Thoroughbred MSY was derived from the Turkoman lineage and that English Thoroughbred sires are largely responsible for the predominance of this haplotype in modern horses.

Keywords

Y chromosome
Equus caballus
horse
breeding
stallion line
haplotype
patrilineal ancestry
phylogeny
genealogy

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14

These authors contributed equally

15

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