Structural variants(SVs; >50 bp) have greater regulatory potential than SNVs and short indels, yet most studies focus on smaller variants. Here, we constructed an SV database using HiFisequencing data from 304 sheepsrepresenting 53 breeds distributed across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. A reference panel (52.4M SNPs, 5.4M indels, 177,420 SVs) was constructed from 5056 high-coverage WGS samples(>120 breeds), and enables accurate SV imputation in low-coverage WGS data (r² > 0.9, concordance > 0.95). Applying this panel to 457 sheeps with paired multi tissue transcriptomes(2,134 samples), we identified 182 SVs as putative causal eQTLs (PIP > 0.8). Expression altering SVs exhibitsignificantly larger effectsizesthan SNVs/indels.
As an example, a 58 kb deletion disrupts multiple exons of CHRNA10 and drivesitsstrong downregulation in the pituitary, illustrating the direct regulatory impact of SVs.