Coding and noncoding variants in HFM1, MLH3, MSH4, MSH5, RNF212, and RNF212B affect recombination rate in cattle

We herein study genetic recombination in three cattle populations from France, New Zealand, and the Netherlands. We identify 2,395,177 crossover (CO) events in 94,516 male gametes, and 579,996 CO events in 25,332 female gametes. The average number of COs was found to be larger in males (23.3) than in females (21.4). The heritability of global recombination rate (GRR) was estimated at 0.13 in males and 0.08 in females, with a genetic correlation of 0.66 indicating that shared variants are influencing GRR in both sexes. A genome-wide association study identified seven quantitative trait loci (QTL) for GRR. Fine-mapping following sequence-based imputation in 14,401 animals pinpointed likely causative coding (5) and noncoding (1) variants in genes known to be involved in meiotic recombination (HFM1, MSH4, RNF212, MLH3, MSH5) for 5/7 QTL, and noncoding variants (3) in RNF212B for 1/7 QTL. This suggests that this RNF212 paralog might also be involved in recombination. Most of the identified mutations had significant effects in both sexes, with three of them each accounting for ∼10% of the genetic variance in males.