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Effectiveness of genomic prediction of boar taint components in Pietrain sired breeding populations
Systematic concern for animal welfare with regard to piglet castration without anesthesia is one challenge in European pig production. For instance, in 2013 the German Federal Council passed the law that non-anaesthetized surgical castration will be prohibited by 2019. One alternative is the fattening of entire boars which is controversially discussed, because the risk of tainted meat has to be minimized. One possibility is to include selection for a low incidence of boar taint in breeding programs.
In this study, beside androstenone (And) and skatole (Ska), boar taint perception was recorded by a 10 member trained sensory panel (SENS) established by Mörlein and colleagues. Compiling data from four research projects, in total 4’000 records for And and Ska, and 1’016 records for SENS were available.
Genetic marker effects of 45’645 SNPs on And, Ska and SENS scores were estimated for 1’240 crossbred boars and 976 purebred Pietrain boars. These crosses and purebred boars reflect the heterogeneous population-structure of the Pietrain breed in Germany. Genomic BLUP was used to estimate genomic breeding values for animals in calibration and validation sets. Reliability of genomic prediction was assessed as correlation between genomic breeding value and conventional breeding values. Several scenarios were investigated to evaluate the effectiveness of genomic prediction.
Heritabilities for And, Ska and SENS were 0.64, 0.48 and 0.36, respectively. In a first scenario genomic prediction was evaluated using a five-fold cross validation within all crossbred animals and showed reliabilities ranging from 0.33 to 0.49. Based on a forward prediction, using crossbred boars as calibration set and Pietrain boars as validation set, reliabilities between 0.15 and 0.50 for all boar taint traits were observed.
Our analysis showed that genomic selection against boar taint is promising. It was possible to reach adequately high reliabilities, even in small populations.
The project is supported by funds of the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) based on a decision of the Parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany via the Federal Office for Agriculture and Food (BLE) under the innovation support programme. Grant no.: 313-06.01-28-1-68.024-11.
Keywords:
swine, boar taint, genomic selection