GENES DIFFERENTIALLY EXPRESSED IN LITTERMATE DUROC AND DUROC-PIETRAIN PIGS DIFFERING IN INTRAMUSCULAR FAT CONTENT

摘要

IntroductionThere is an increasing interest in manipulating intramuscular fat (IMF) content and composition in pigs. IMF content has been associated to meat eating quality, particularly for production of high quality cured products, while IMF composition has been associated with organoleptic characteristics and human health. Variation among breeds in IMF content has been the main genetic resource used by the industry for varying IMF grades. Attempts for direct selection of IMF conflict with the fact that there is still no easy procedure to obtain live measurements. This has prompted the research to identify genetic polymorphisms associated to IMF variation. Several genetic markers associated to IMF content and composition, including single genes (Gerbens et al. 2001) or quantitative trait loci (Perez-Enciso et al., 2000), as well as some physiological biomarkers (Suzuki et al, 2004), have been recently reported. However, their functional role remains mostly unknown. Microarray and analytical mass spectrometry technologies are powerful tools for screening both the genome and the proteome and for providing new insight into the genetic and physiological mechanisms underlying target traits (Mullen et al., 2006). In this work we present an experiment aimed at comparing the genetic and the proteomic profiling of two pig breeds differing for IMF content. In particular, here we report the first results concerning genes differentially expressed in Duroc and Duroc x Pietrain dam half-sibs.