Abstract
Fatty acid (FA) composition is one of the most important parameters for the assessment of meat quality in pigs. The FA composition in pork can also affect human health. Our aim was to identify quantitative trait loci (QTLs) and positional candidate genes affecting the FA profile of the longissimus dorsi muscle in a large F2 intercross between Landrace and Korean native pigs comprising 1105 F2 progeny by genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and post-GWAS high-resolution mapping analyses. We performed GWAS using the PorcineSNP60K BeadChip and a linear mixed model. Four genome-wide significant QTL regions in SSC8, SSC12, SSC14, and SSC16 were detected (p < 2.53 × 10−7). Several co-localizations of QTLs in SSC12 for oleic acid, linoleic acid, arachidonic acid, monounsaturated FAs, polyunsaturated FAs, and the polyunsaturated/saturated FA ratio were observed. To refine the QTL region in SSC12, a linkage and linkage disequilibrium analysis was applied and could narrow down the critical region to a 0.749 Mb region. Of the genes in this region, GAS7, MYH2, and MYH3 were identified as strong novel candidate genes based on further conditional association analyses. These findings provide a novel insight into the genetic basis of FA composition in pork and could contribute to the improvement of pork quality.
Highlights
The average estimate of heritability for the 19 Fatty acid (FA) composition traits was 0.396, which indicates that the contribution of genetic effects to phenotypic variation in FA composition traits is substantial
genome-wide association studies (GWAS) detected 22 genome-wide significant QTLs (p < 2.53 × 10−7 ) for the 17 FA traits located on pig chromosome 8 (SSC8), SSC12, SSC14, and SSC16 (Table 2, Figure 1, Supplementary Figure S1)
We aimed to identify individual positional candidate gene(s) in the FA
Summary
FA composition plays an important role in the evaluation of pork quality because it can contribute to sensorial, nutritional, and functional factors. FA composition controls the oxidative stability of pork, which in turn affects meat color and flavor [1]. Linoleic acid (an omega-6 FA) and α-linolenic acid (an omega-3 FA) are regarded as essential fatty acids because they cannot be synthesized in mammals [2]. The ratio of unsaturated FA (UFA) and saturated FA (SFA) levels in membrane fluidity and cell–cell interactions has been implicated in various types of human diseases, such as obesity [3], 4.0/). FA composition plays a crucial role in the quality of pork but is highly relevant to human health. Multiple genomic approaches have been applied to elucidate the genetic architecture of FA composition in pork, such as GWAS using imputed sequence data [7], expression QTL study [8], and RNA-seq analyses [9,10]
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