Mapping genomic regions affecting milk traits in Sarda sheep by using the OvineSNP50 Beadchip and principal components to perform combined linkage and linkage disequilibrium analysis.

PCA is a good strategy to summarize IBD probabilities. A large number of regions associated to milk traits were identified. The outputs provided by the proposed method are useful for the selection of candidate genes, which need to be further investigated to identify causative mutations or markers in strong LD with them for application in selection programs assisted by molecular information.