A parallel survey on the fatty acid composition in backfat and longissimus lumborum and comparison of their associations with growth and carcass traits in pigs

Abstract

Compositions of fatty acids are critical parameters of meat nutrition and palatability. This study investigated phenotypes of 21 fatty acid composition traits in both backfat (BF) and longissimus lumborum (LL) tissues in 583 F7 mosaic pigs from an eight-breed crossed heterogeneous population, and their associations with 25 detailed measured growth and carcass traits in the same population. We showed that the LL has significantly higher content of saturated and mono-unsaturated fatty acids, and lower poly-unsaturated fatty acids than BF. Most of fatty acid composition traits in both LL and BF show significant correlations with growth and carcass traits. Notably, the correlations with the growth and carcass traits for fatty acid composition traits in BF are much stronger than that in LL, suggesting closer relationship of the growth and carcass traits with metabolism of the fatty acids in fat than in muscle. The polyunsaturated fatty acid traits including C18:2n6, PUFA, C20:2n6, C20:3n6 were among the fatty acid composition traits showing the strongest correlation with growth and carcass traits in both BF and LL, suggesting an interesting link between the metabolism of polyunsaturated fatty acids in muscle and fat tissues with the growth and carcass phenotypes. The results provide helpful insights that are helpful to the breeding program aiming to simultaneously improve the fatty acid composition, growth and carcass traits in pigs.