A genome-wide association study of five meat quality traits in Yorkshire pigs

Abstract

Meat quality is an important trait in the pig industry. To identify genomic regions and haplotype blocks responsible for meat quality traits in pigs, a genome-wide association study was conducted for five traits including intramuscular fat content, pH at 45 min and 24 h, drip loss within 24 h and water-holding capacity in 231 Yorkshire barrows using illumina porcine 60k SNP chips. The results showed that a total of 344 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) were significantly associated with five meat quality traits (P<1×10^-4). Moreover, 323 SNPs were within the reported QTL regions, of which 21 were novel. Also, 158 SNPs fell into the proximal region of meat quality related genes. In addition, 25 haplotype blocks based on 116 SNPs were revealed with SNP combination patterns for five traits. Our study added new SNP information for identification of meat quality traits in pigs and will help elucidate the mechanisms of meat quality in pigs.

Keywords

Pig / GWAS / meat quality trait / SNP

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by grants from the National Key Basic Research Program of China (2012CB124702), National Outstanding Youth Foundation of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31025026), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

Supplementary materialsƒThe online version of this article at http://dx.doi.org/10.15302/J-FASE-2014014 contains supplementary materials (Appendix A and B).

Compliance with ethics guidelinesƒQian Dong, Huiying Liu, Xinyun Li, Wei Wei, Shuhong Zhao and Jianhua Cao declare that they have no conflict of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.ƒAll applicable institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed.

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Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg