Genetics and Genomics of Sheep and Goat

Dear Colleagues,

Sheep and goat species diverged about 4 million years ago, and were the earliest domesticated animals with economic and nutritional value. As a result of natural and artificial selection over a long period of time, there are now nearly 2,000 species of sheep and goats in the world. Before the 19th century, wool sales were the main income of the sheep industry. Since then, sheep or goat production has gradually changed from wool to both wool and meat, and then to meat, which resulted in changes in their breeding direction and a corresponding hybrid utilization system. Nevertheless, sheep and goats show their own characteristics in regard to reproductive rate, cashmere yield, meat yield, meat quality and other production performances, as well as different degrees of stimulation in their germplasm resources, providing excellent opportunities to explore the evolution and heredity of sheep and goats. In recent years, with the development of the sheep and goat genome, the most important questions related to the promotion of biological research and breeding of these important animals are highly relevant topics of inquiry; this includes the exploration of the genetic basis of important production traits in sheep and goats, and the functional anatomy of key genes.

To this end, this Special Issue invites research articles, reviews, and short communications that include, but are not limited to, the following: genetics analysis and improvements in breeding the important traits of sheep and goats, molecular function dissection, gene regulation mechanisms, gene family evolution, expression regulation networks, and other studies of sheep and goats using high-throughput data.

Dr. Yan Xiong
Prof. Dr. Yaqiu Lin
Guest Editors

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