James E. Womack

TL;DR: To understand the biology and evolution of ruminants, the cattle genome was sequenced to about sevenfold coverage and provides a resource for understanding mammalian evolution and accelerating livestock genetic improvement for milk and meat production.

TL;DR: Data show that cattle have undergone a rapid recent decrease in effective population size from a very large ancestral population, possibly due to bottlenecks associated with domestication, selection, and breed formation.

TL;DR: A cattle genetic linkage map was constructed which marks about 90% of the expected length of the cattle genome and shows as many differences in gene order compared to humans as is found between humans and mice.

TL;DR: In this paper, the genome organizations of eight phylogenetically distinct species from five mammalian orders were compared in order to address fundamental questions relating to mammalian chromosomal evolution, and it was found that segmental duplications populate the majority of primate-specific breakpoints and often flank inverted chromosome segments, implicating their role in chromosomal rearrangement.

TL;DR: Comparative genetic assessment expands the utility of dense genetic maps of human, mouse, and rat genomes in gene discovery, in functional genomics, and in tracking the evolutionary forces that sculpted the genome organization of modern mammalian species.