Abstract
Over the past years, infectious disease has caused enormous economic loss in pig industry. Among the pathogens, gram negative bacteria not only cause inflammation, but also cause different diseases and make the pigs more susceptible to virus infection. Vaccination, medication and elimination of sick pigs are major strategies of controlling disease. Genetic methods, such as selection of disease resistance in the pig, have not been widely used. Recently, the completion of the porcine whole genome sequencing has provided powerful tools to identify the genome regions that harboring genes controlling disease or immunity. Immunogenomics, which combines DNA variations, transcriptome, immune response, and QTL mapping data to illustrate the interactions between pathogen and host immune system, will be an effective genomics tool for identification of disease resistance genes in pigs. These genes will be potential targets for disease resistance in breeding programs. This paper reviewed the progress of disease resistance study in the pig focusing on Gram-negative bacilli. Major porcine Gram-negative bacilli and diseases, suggested candidate genes/pathways against porcine Gram-negative bacilli, and distributions of QTLs for immune capacity on pig chromosomes were summarized. Some tools for immunogenomics research were described. We conclude that integration of sequencing, whole genome associations, functional genomics studies, and immune response information is necessary to illustrate molecular mechanisms and key genes in disease resistance.
Highlights
Infectious disease, caused by bacteria or virus, has always been a big barrier of effective pig production worldwide
Producers use vaccination, medication and elimination of sick pigs as major strategies of controlling disease [1,2]. Genetic methods such as selection of disease resistance in the pig has not been widely used due to several reasons: First, selection of meat production traits ignored the improvement of disease resistance traits; Second, due to the complexity of infectious disease caused by multiple pathogens, selection hardly become effective to control all type of diseases; Third, basic research has not identified enough genes/pathways that can be used in disease resistant breeding
Immunogenomics, which combines DNA variations, transcriptome, immune response data, and QTL mapping to illustrate the interactions between pathogen and host immune system, will be an effective genomics tool for identification of disease resistance genes in pigs
Summary
Infectious disease, caused by bacteria or virus, has always been a big barrier of effective pig production worldwide. Immunogenomics, which combines DNA variations, transcriptome, immune response data, and QTL mapping to illustrate the interactions between pathogen and host immune system, will be an effective genomics tool for identification of disease resistance genes in pigs. Much consideration is needed, good news is that variations in resistance to many porcine pathogens including Gram-negatives do exist [57,58,59,60] For breeding programs such as MAS, the first task is to attempt to identify host candidate genes/genetic markers. One important aspect of the future studies should focus on Chinese indigenous pig breeds that deposit a large complex of gene resources for disease resistance, including isolation, cloning, and identification of specific resistance alleles accompanying with large-scale explorations of their biological functions. Besides mining gene materials for anti-disease breeding, we should eye on the application-oriented issues such as molecular techniques for gene diagnosis and testing reagent boxes, and molecular selection approaches matching the characteristics of pig breeding system
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