Abstract
Background: Natural selection has molded evolution across all taxa. At an arguable date of around 330,000 years
ago there were already at least two different types of cattle that became ancestors of nearly all modern cattle, the
Bos taurus taurus more adapted to temperate climates and the tropically adapted Bos taurus indicus. After
domestication, human selection exponentially intensified these differences. To better understand the genetic
differences between these subspecies and detect genomic regions potentially under divergent selection, animals
from the International Bovine HapMap Experiment were genotyped for over 770,000 SNP across the genome and
compared using smoothed FST. The taurine sample was represented by ten breeds and the contrasting zebu cohort
by three breeds