The animal Article of the Month for December is “Genome-wide association study of bone mineral density trait among three pig breeds” by B. Jiang et al.

Reproduction performance and service longevity are economically important and have been intensively selected in the global pig industry. Leg weakness has a great impact on the fitness of animals, which influences not only animal welfare but also productive and reproductive performances. Pigs with leg weakness are more likely to suffer from limb-and-hoof diseases and be eliminated early, which greatly limits the service longevity of excellent pigs. However, the study of leg weakness is limited, especially in pig populations. In addition, the measurement of the phenotype may be subjective; it may affect the health of pigs or even terminate their lives. Therefore, applying an unharmful and objective method to assess the leg weakness of alive pigs will benefit animal welfare and improve the accuracy of phenotype data. Bone mineral density can reflect the degree of leg weakness, and measurements by ultrasonic bone densitometer are objective and harmless for pigs. The genotype data were acquired by genotyping by-sequencing.

This study aimed to identify single-nucleotide polymorphism associated with bone mineral density across three populations, including Duroc, Landrace and Yorkshire pigs, by GWAS method. Dissection of the genetic architecture of leg weakness in pigs not only benefits the pig industry and animal welfare but also sheds insight into our understanding of human osteoporosis because pig is an ideal animal model for humans and the shape and size of pig’s organ is similar to that of humans.

In our study, we found that breed, parity and the interaction between breed and parity had very significant effects on the metatarsal bone mineral density of sows. We detected a total of nine single-nucleotide polymorphisms that were significantly associated with bone mineral density trait. CUL7, PTK7, SRF, VEGFA, RHEB, PRKAR1A and TPO were selected as the plausible candidate genes related to bone mineral density trait by enrichment analysis and functional annotation.

The animal Article of the Month for December “Genome-wide association study of bone mineral density trait among three pig breeds” is free for a month.

Authors: B. Jiang, M. Wang, Z. Tang, X. Du, S. Feng, G. Ma, D. Ye, H. Cheng, H. Wang and X. Liu

The animal Article of the Month is selected by the Editor-in-Chief and is freely available until December 31. View the recent selections