bibtex key=32293027]

Description

The sex determination system of Atlantic herring  Clupea harengus  L., a commercially important fish, was investigated. Low coverage whole-genome sequencing of 48 females and 55 males and a genome-wide association study revealed two regions on chromosomes 8 and 21 associated with sex. The genotyping data of the single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with sex showed that 99.4% of the available female genotypes were homozygous, whereas 68.6% of the available male genotypes were heterozygous. This is close to the theoretical expectation of homo/heterozygous distribution at low sequencing coverage when the males are factually heterozygous. This suggested a male heterogametic sex determination system in  C. harengus , consistent with other species within the Clupeiformes group. There were 76 protein coding genes on the sex regions but none of these genes were previously reported master sex regulation genes, or obviously related to sex determination. However, many of these genes are expressed in testis or ovary in other species, but the exact genes controlling sex determination in  C. harengus  could not be identified.

Full details are provided in our  open access publication in the Journal of Fish Biology

Data access

The sequencing reads were submitted to the European Nucleotide Archive repository and are available in 103 samples with accession numbers from  ERS4329014  to  ERS4329116 .

SNPs were called using FreeBayes v1.1.0 and are available  here .

The results from the GWAS analysis can be found  here .

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