Estimation of genetic parameters and detection of quantitative trait loci for minerals in Danish Holstein and Danish Jersey milk

BACKGROUND: Bovine milk provides important minerals, essential for human nutrition and dairy product quality. For changing the mineral composition of the milk to improve dietary needs in human nutrition and technological properties of milk, a thorough understanding of the genetics underlying milk mineral contents is important. Therefore the aim of this study was to 1) estimate the genetic parameters for individual minerals in Danish Holstein (DH) (n = 371) and Danish Jersey (DJ) (n = 321) milk, and 2) detect genomic regions associated with mineral content in the milk using a genome-wide association study (GWAS) approach. RESULTS: For DH, high heritabilities were found for Ca (0.72), Zn (0.49), and P (0.46), while for DJ, high heritabilities were found for Ca (0.63), Zn (0.57), and Mg (0.57). Furthermore, intermediate heritabilities were found for Cu in DH, and for K, Na, P and Se in the DJ. The GWAS revealed a total of 649 significant SNP markers detected for Ca (24), Cu (90), Fe (111), Mn (3), Na (1), P (4), Se (12) and Zn (404) in DH, while for DJ, a total of 787 significant SNP markers were detected for Ca (44), Fe (43), K (498), Na (4), Mg (1), P (94) and Zn (3). Comparing the list of significant markers between DH and DJ revealed that the SNP ARS-BFGL-NGS-4939 was common in both breeds for Zn. This SNP marker is closely linked to the DGAT1 gene. Even though we found significant SNP markers on BTA14 in both DH and DJ for Ca, and Fe these significant SNPs did not overlap. CONCLUSION: The results show that Ca, Zn, P and Mg show high heritabilities. In combination with the GWAS results this opens up possibilities to select for specific minerals in bovine milk. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12863-015-0209-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.