Abstract
Abstract In recent years, swine breeding programs have turned their selection attentions from focusing mostly on growth, feed efficiency and percent fat towards including meat quality and carcass traits with aims to efficiently produce nutritious and tasty meat to attend a growing demand for pork. In this context, the success of genetic selection for such traits relies on several factors, especially the heritability (h2) of the traits included in the selection indexes. Therefore, this study aimed to estimate genetic parameters for seven meat quality and carcass traits in Duroc pigs, including: meat lightness (L*), loin pH (pH), marbling (MARB), untrimmed belly weight (UBLW), untrimmed ham weight (UHW), untrimmed loin weight (ULW), and untrimmed shoulder weight (USW). Phenotypic measurements were collected on 2,857 purebred Duroc gilts from a Terminal Sire line. The pedigree-based relationship matrix included 5,316 animals and genetic parameters were estimated using univariate models under the REML approach. The traits studied here were shown to be moderately to highly heritable (h2 estimates were 0.32, 0.42, 0.47, 0.35, 0.24, 0.28, and 0.28 for L*, pH, MARB, UBLW, UHW, ULW, and USW, respectively). Our findings suggest that these traits are under genetic control, and thus, they can be genetically improved if included in selection schemes. The next step will be to estimate the genetic correlation between those traits (among themselves and with other traits), as well as alternatives to efficiently incorporate these traits in the selection indexes.
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