Data from: Adaptive admixture in the West African bovine hybrid zone: insight from the Borgou population

Understanding the adaptive response to environmental fluctuations
represents a central issue in evolutionary biology. Population admixture
between divergent ancestries has often been considered as an efficient
short-term adaptation strategy. Cattle populations from the West African
Bos taurus x Bos indicus hybrid zone represent a valuable resource to
characterize the effect of such adaptive admixture at the genome level. We
here provide a detailed assessment of the global and local genome
ancestries of the Borgou breed, one of the most representative cattle of
this hybrid zone. We analyzed a large data set consisting of 38,100 SNPs
genotyped on 203 Borgou and 591 individuals representative of all the
different cattle ancestries. At the global genomic level, we show that
Borgou is a stabilized admixed breed whose origin (130 years ago) traces
back to the great African rinderpest pandemic, several centuries after the
last admixture events, the West-African zebus originate from (512 years
ago). To identify footprints of adaptive admixture, we combined the
identification of signatures of selection and the functional annotation of
the underlying genes using systems biology tools. The detection of the
SILV coat coloration gene likely under artificial selection may be viewed
as a validation of our approach. Overall our results suggest that the
long-term presence of pathogens and the intermediate environmental
conditions are the main acting selective pressures. Our analytical
framework can be extended to other model or non-model species to
understand the process that shapes the patterns of genetic variability in
hybrid zones.