**Preface to "Cytogenetics of Domestic Animals: Clinical, Molecular and Evolutionary Aspects"**

With the discovery of 1;29 Robertsonian translocation in Swedish red cattle (Gustavson and Rockborn, 1964), which was later demonstrated to reduce fertility in the carriers and was found in more than 50 different breeds (mainly meat breeds) in various frequencies (reaching 80% of the carriers in some breeds), cytogenetics became a discipline applied in various laboratories dedicated to research on domestic animal genetics. The attention of scientists now focuses on several sectors, such as clinical cytogenetics, evolutionary cytogenetics, molecular cytogenetics, and environmental cytogenetics.

In this Special Issue, several important groups from different parts of the world provide interesting contributions to enlighten the field of domestic animal cytogenetics. Both exhaustive reviews (five papers) and original contributions (height papers) are included. The reviews focus particularly on the clinical cytogenetics of the most important domestic species, such as cattle, river buffalo, sheep, goats (Iannuzzi et al., 2021), horses (Bugno-Poniewierska and Raudsepp, 2021), dogs (Szczerbal et al., 2021), and pigs (Donaldson et al., 2021). A final review focuses on the molecular cytogenetics of domestic bovids (Iannuzzi et al., 2023).

The original contributions involve different animal species and investigate various aspects. These include (a) the clinical cytogenetics of horses (Ghosh et al., 2022; Demyda-Peyras et al., 2022), ´ cattle (Szczerbal et al., 2022), and Asian elephants (Cernohorska et al., 2023); (b) chromosomal instability in Esperia ponies naturally infected with intestinal Strongylidae (D'Anza et al., 2022); (c) evolutionary chromosomal rearrangements in Cervidae (Vozdova et al., 2021); (d) the karyotype evolution and genomic organization of repetitive DNA in the saffron finch, Passeriformes (Kretschmern et al., 2021); and (e) the comparative FISH mapping of twenty-three endogenous Jaagsiekte sheep retroviruses (enJSRVs) in sheep and river buffalo (Perucatti et al., 2022).

### **Leopoldo Iannuzzi and Pietro Parma** *Editors*
