In Silico Insights Into Growth Hormone Variants: Structural and Functional Implications of Breed‐Specific SNPs in Sheep

Growth hormone (GH) is a key determinant of various productive traits in sheep; however, the genetic diversity of GH across breeds and the structural and functional consequences of breed-specific SNPs remain largely unexplored. Based on multiple sequence alignments of the GH sequences, 14 models were suggested, and 11 of them were validated using phylogenetic analysis. Most of the SNPs exhibited various deleterious effects on GH structure, function, and stability. Docking with GHR showed the presence of four top-hits among the prioritized models. These models are Model-4 (Serra da Estrela), Model-6 (Hu), Model-9 (Awassi), and Model-11 (Kajli). MD simulation showed the superiority of Model-4 over the other best hits. Given the non-deleterious nature of the SNP in Model-4 and its high binding stability with the GHR, the described computational pipeline suggests that this variant is a potential candidate for evaluating favorable GH-related traits across sheep in a time- and cost-effective manner.