Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 282, Issue 1821, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.2019
Keywords
hybridization; adaptive introgression; selection; domestication; Sus scrofa; commercial breeding
Categories
Funding
- European Research Council under European Community's Seventh Framework Programme/ERC grant [249894]
- Breed4Food consortium
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Early pig farmers in Europe imported Asian pigs to cross with their local breeds in order to improve traits of commercial interest. Current genomics techniques enabled genome-wide identification of these Asian introgressed haplotypes in modern European pig breeds. We propose that the Asian variants are still present because they affect phenotypes that were important for ancient traditional, as well as recent, commercial pig breeding. Genome-wide introgression levels were only weakly correlated with gene content and recombination frequency. However, regions with an excess or absence of Asian haplotypes (AS) contained genes that were previously identified as phenotypically important such as FASN, ME1, and KIT. Therefore, the Asian alleles are thought to have an effect on phenotypes that were historically under selection. We aimed to estimate the effect of AS in introgressed regions in Large White pigs on the traits of backfat (BF) and litter size. The majority of regions we tested that retained Asian deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) showed significantly increased BF from the Asian alleles. Our results suggest that the introgression in Large White pigs has been strongly determined by the selective pressure acting upon the introgressed AS. We therefore conclude that human-driven hybridization and selection contributed to the genomic architecture of these commercial pigs.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available