Goats (Capra hircus) provide a rich source of products, such as meat, milk, and wool, and are important domestic animals in many parts of the world.  Goats were one of the first domesticated livestock species during the late Neolithic period, approximately 11,000 years ago, in the Fertile Crescent.  In the past decades, genomic studies of goats have provided insight into their domestication and genetic basis of economically important traits.  This review outlines the latest advancements that have been made in reference to domestication and genetic improvement of production traits such as meat and carcass quality, reproduction, milk, cashmere, and functional traits such as environmental adaptation and disease-resistance.  Genomic research is entering a new era with the availability of graphical pan-genomics and telomere-to-telomere (T2T) gap-free genome assembly, which will extend our understanding of domestication and molecular mechanistic dissection of economic traits in goats.  We provide new perspectives and future directions for genomics and suggest how the ever-increasing multi-omics dataset will facilitate future studies and molecular breeding in goat.

Stellera chamaejasme is a pernicious plant of grasslands in China. Its expansion has been linked to changes in the soil microbial community structure and to nitrogen accumulation. Increased nitrogen availability may enhance competitiveness of the weed and disrupt plant community structure. We sought to establish whether presence of this species evokes the same changes to soil properties and microbiome community structure in regions with divergent native soil properties. For this, we compared soil samples collected from under native vegetation (controls) with those taken from beneath S. chamaejasme plants in grasslands of eastern Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (QT) and the middle Inner Mongolia Plateau (IM). In QT, soil beneath S. chamaejasme contained higher nitrogen levels than controls, but not phosphorus. In contrast, S. chamaejasme and control soil samples from IM did not differ in nitrogen content, but S. chamaejasme soil samples had raised soil P. Soil bacterial community responses to S. chamaejasme also differed between regions. S. chamaejasme soils from QT had increased relative abundances of some diazotrophs (Bradyrhizobium, Mesorhizobium, Phyllobacterium) that positively correlated with soil nitrogen but no similar tends were detected in IM soils. Redundancy analysis revealed significant associations between soil ammonium and bacterial genera implicated in soil N-cycles. In QT, modelling suggested that S. chamaejasme increased N-cycling soil bacteria linked to increased available nitrogen. However, in IM soil N-cycling soil bacteria and soil nitrogen levels were unaffected by S. chamaejasme and its presence did not link to N-based soil changes. We conclude that S. chamaejasme evokes different changes to the native soils of these two regions. We postulate that S. chamaejasme may exhibit plasticity in response to soil conditions it encounters and that this may be one reason for its soil impact being context dependent. This divergent interaction between S. chamaejasme and host soils may facilitate further expansion of its current range.