Genetic study on heritability and novel SNP loci of temperament in Chinese Kunming Dog

Chinese Kunming dog (CKD) is a working breed widely used by army, customs and police across the country. To better evaluate a breeding population's potential working performance and implement selective breeding for future offspring, a temperament test with five subsets, including following to trainer (FO), reaction to stranger (RS), tease by towel (TT), chase and fetch (CF) and tug of war (TW), was annually operated by the Kunming Police Dog Base since 2019. To fully utilize this behavioral data, 92 breeding animals of CKDs were genotyped by a 50K SNP chip, and a GWAS method supporting repeated measurement was adopted to estimate heritabilities and explore genetic variants associated with the five subsets. The heritabilities estimated for the five subsets ranged from 0,03 to 0.14, which showed a possibility for genetic improvement. Meanwhile, in total seven novel SNPs were identified associated with subsets FO, TT, CF and TW. In addition to that five of the seven loci are separately located within ACOT11, PRDM16, SAMD12, CPA1 and ENSCAFG00000023173 genes. Nevertheless, genetic effects of these novel loci on dog temperament should be further validated by a larger dataset in the future.