Microsatellite diversity of the Nordic type of goats in relation to breed conservation: how relevant is pure ancestry?

In the last decades, several endangered breeds of livestock species have been re-established effectively. However, the successful revival of the Dutch and Danish Landrace goats involved crossing with exotic breeds and the ancestry of the current populations is therefore not clear. We have generated genotypes for 27 FAO-recommended microsatellites of these landraces and three phenotypically similar Nordic-type landraces and compared these breeds with central European, Mediterranean and south-west Asian goats. We found decreasing levels of genetic diversity with increasing distance from the south-west Asian domestication site with a south-east-to-north-west cline that is clearly steeper than the Mediterranean east-to-west cline. In terms of genetic diversity, the Dutch Landrace comes next to the isolated Icelandic breed, which has an extremely low diversity. The Norwegian coastal goat and the Finnish and Icelandic landraces are clearly related. It appears that by a combination of mixed origin and a population bottleneck, the Dutch and Danish Land-races are separated from the other breeds. However, the current Dutch and Danish populations with the multicoloured and long-horned appearance effectively substitute for the original breed, illustrating that for conservation of cultural heritage, the phenotype of a breed is more relevant than pure ancestry and the genetic diversity of the original breed. More in general, we propose that for conservation, the retention of genetic diversity of an original breed and of the visual phenotype by which the breed is recognized and defined needs to be considered separately

Model-Adaptive Event Triggering for Monitoring Recurrent Mobility Patterns in Public Transport

Event-triggering (ET) is a highly promising technique for efficient operation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, where instead of continuous or even periodic triggering of events, communication and control is only applied after some event interrupt. In this work, the proposed event-triggering technique is examined and applied on public transportation services, having as an objective to provide good tracking accuracy for a fleet of buses, while limiting communication between the system’s components. Specifically, an ET technique is proposed, where a local and a remote host use behavior modeling to track the evolution of the system and synchronization messages are only sent when deviations are detected between the nominal model and the actual behavior of the system. This work focuses on a multi-model event triggering and proposes and develops a multi-model ET (MMET) technique, where multiple models are derived to accurately represent the system state. This is achieved by utilizing data-driven approaches that are used to analyze recurrent patterns and predict the system’s behavior. In this way, both local and remote hosts can adapt to system changes by switching to the most accurate model that best represents the underlying system settings. The proposed MMET technique is subsequently compared to the single-model event triggering (SMET) approach, as well as traditional periodic triggering techniques, demonstrating that MMET can provide better performance in terms of tracking accuracy at a lower number of communication events, reducing in this way communication energy consumption as well

Geographical contrasts of Y‐chromosomal haplogroups from wild and domestic goats reveal ancient migrations and recent introgressions

International audienceBy their paternal transmission, Y-chromosomal haplotypes are sensitive markers of population history and male-mediated introgression. Previous studies identified biallelic single-nucleotide variants in the SRY, ZFY and DDX3Y genes, which in domestic goats identified four major Y-chromosomal haplotypes, Y1A, Y1B, Y2A and Y2B, with a marked geographical partitioning. Here, we extracted goat Y-chromosomal variants from whole-genome sequences of 386 domestic goats (75 breeds) and seven wild goat species, which were generated by the VarGoats goat genome project. Phylogenetic analyses indicated domestic haplogroups corresponding to Y1B, Y2A and Y2B, respectively, whereas Y1A is split into Y1AA and Y1AB. All five haplogroups were detected in 26 ancient DNA samples from southeast Europe or Asia. Haplotypes from present-day bezoars are not shared with domestic goats and are attached to deep nodes of the trees and networks. Haplogroup distributions for 186 domestic breeds indicate ancient paternal population bottlenecks and expansions during migrations into northern Europe, eastern and southern Asia, and Africa south of the Sahara. In addition, sharing of haplogroups indicates male-mediated introgressions, most notably an early gene flow from Asian goats into Madagascar and the crossbreeding that in the 19th century resulted in the popular Boer and Anglo-Nubian breeds. More recent introgressions are those from European goats into the native Korean goat population and from Boer goat into Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi and Zimbabwe. This study illustrates the power of the Y-chromosomal variants for reconstructing the history of domestic species with a wide geographical range