Abstract
Background: The extent of linkage disequilibrium (LD) between molecular markers impacts genome-wide
association studies and implementation of genomic selection. The availability of high-density single nucleotide
polymorphism (SNP) genotyping platforms makes it possible to investigate LD at an unprecedented resolution. In
this work, we characterised LD decay in breeds of beef cattle of taurine, indicine and composite origins and
explored its variation across autosomes and the X chromosome.
Findings: In each breed, LD decayed rapidly and r2 was less than 0.2 for marker pairs separated by 50 kb. The LD
decay curves clustered into three groups of similar LD decay that distinguished the three main cattle types. At short
distances between markers (< 10 kb), taurine breeds showed higher LD (r2 = 0.45) than their indicine (r2 = 0.25) and
composite (r2 = 0.32) counterparts. This higher LD in taurine breeds was attributed to a smaller effective population
size and a stronger bottleneck during breed formation. Using all SNPs on only the X chromosome, the three cattle
types could still be distinguished. However for taurine breeds, the LD decay on the X chromosome was much
faster and the background level much lower than for indicine breeds and composite populations. When using only
SNPs that were polymorphic in all breeds, the analysis of the X chromosome mimicked that of the autosomes.
Conclusions: The pattern of LD mirrored some aspects of the history of breed populations and showed a sharp
decay with increasing physical distance between markers. We conclude that the availability of the HD chip can be
used to detect association signals that remained hidden when using lower density genotyping platforms, since LD
dropped below 0.2 at distances of 50 kb.