Evolution of the Bovine TLR Gene Family and Member Associations with Mycobacterium avium Subspecies paratuberculosis Infection

Fisher, Colleen A.; Bhattarai, Eric K.; Osterstock, Jason B.; Dowd, Scot E.; Seabury, Paul M.; Vikram, Meenu; Whitlock, Robert H.; Schukken, Ynte H.; Schnabel, Robert D.; Taylor, Jeremy F.; Womack, James E.; Seabury, Christopher M.

The ultimate goal of bovine genomics is the identification of genetic variation that modulates corresponding variation in economically important production traits, differential susceptibility to disease, and favorable host response to vaccines, which is expected to enable the improvement of these phenotypes via informed genomic selection (for review see [1] ). The bovine genome sequence and first-generation HapMap projects [2, 3] have directly enabled genome-assisted selective breeding [1] , nascent investigations of non-traditional traits such as marker-assisted vaccination (as diagnostics for enhanced vaccine design or animal response), the development of a new class of anti-infectives known as innate immunologicals [4] , and the elucidation of loci that have evolved under strong selection, thus providing important computational evidence for genomic regions which may underlie economically important traits.