We have a new preprint posted, showing that recombination rate in the pig is lowly heritable and associated with alleles at RNF212.

We developed a new method to estimate recombinations in 150,000 pigs, and used that to estimate heritability and perform genome-wide association studies in 23,000.

Here is the preprint:

Johnsson M*, Whalen A*, Ros-Freixedes R, Gorjanc G, Chen C-Y, Herring WO, de Koning D-J, Hickey JM. (2020) Genetics of recombination rate variation in the pig. BioRxiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.17.995969 (* equal contribution)

Here is the abstract:

Background In this paper, we estimated recombination rate variation within the genome and between individuals in the pig for 150,000 pigs across nine genotyped pedigrees. We used this to estimate the heritability of recombination and perform a genome-wide association study of recombination in the pig.

Results Our results confirmed known features of the pig recombination landscape, including differences in chromosome length, and marked sex differences. The recombination landscape was repeatable between lines, but at the same time, the lines also showed differences in average genome-wide recombination rate. The heritability of genome-wide recombination was low but non-zero (on average 0.07 for females and 0.05 for males). We found three genomic regions associated with recombination rate, one of them harbouring the RNF212 gene, previously associated with recombination rate in several other species.

Conclusion Our results from the pig agree with the picture of recombination rate variation in vertebrates, with low but nonzero heritability, and a major locus that is homologous to one detected in several other species. This work also highlights the utility of using large-scale livestock data to understand biological processes.