Genomic structural differences between cattle and River Buffalo identified through comparative genomic and transcriptomic analysis

Abstract

Water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis L.) is an important livestock species worldwide. Like many other livestock species, water buffalo lacks high quality and continuous reference genome assembly, required for fine-scale comparative genomics studies. In this work, we present a dataset, which characterizes genomic differences between water buffalo genome and the extensively studied cattle (Bos taurus Taurus) reference genome. This data set is obtained after alignment of 14 river buffalo whole genome sequencing datasets to the cattle reference. This data set consisted of 13,444 deletion CNV regions, and 11,050 merged mobile element insertion (MEI) events within the upstream regions of annotated cattle genes. Gene expression data from cattle and buffalo were also presented for genes impacted by these regions. Public assessment of this dataset will allow for further analyses and functional annotation of genes that are potentially associated with phenotypic difference between cattle and water buffalo.