Intensively detected allelic variations in the 7th exon of yak FTO gene

Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) analysis of fat mass and obesity associated (FTO) gene has been associated with obesity in multiple populations. It was shown that FTO gene had been involved in the regulation of the activities of feeding, energy balance and fat storage. This experiment randomly collected 110 blood samples from Maiwa yak groups. To verified whether there were mutations among the nine exons in the Bos grunniens FTO gene, this study investigated the variations through PCR and sequencing. Only the 5 exon and 7 exon were found with variations. The 7 exon was chosen to experiment for more hotspots than the 5 exon. Six mutation hotspots were identified through sequence alignment. Haplotype frequencies and linkage disequilibrium (LD) coefficients of these SNPs were analyzed. In this data, only a pair of SNPs we found were strong linkage disequilibrium and one haploid type has the highest frequency. To sum up, the FTO gene of Maiwa yak in this study was determined extremely probable to be a housekeeping gene.