Farmscape for November 30, 2016
A Senior Geneticist with Fast Genetics says the use of Genomics to identify the presence of desirable traits has accelerated the evaluations of breeding stock within the swine industry.
Genomics is the study of the genome of an animal or an organism.
Murray Duggan, a Senior Geneticist with Fast Genetics, explains the genome of pigs have 19 pairs of chromosomes, 18 autosomes, one set of sex chromosomes and strung together approximately 2.8 billion base pairs, and there's little difference in size from the pig to the humans to cattle.
Clip-Murray Duggan-Fast Genetics:
In pigs we're all about production efficiency, carcass and meat quality basically, so the production efficiency traits in maternal lines, litter size, the ability to raise a large litter of pigs, large weaning weights, a sow that rebreeds quickly and reliably and will continue to do that for six or eight or more parities in a commercial herd.
On the terminal side we're looking for things like rapid growth rate, good feed conversion and a carcass that hangs up and is a carcass and a pork cut that people want to buy, that consumers want to buy.
Blup genetic evaluations, animal model evaluations have been widespread in all of the livestock industries, in pigs since the early 1970s.
Blup has been the method for selecting animals of all species since basically the early 1970s, so 40 or 50 years now those have been the main items.
Genomics is relatively recent so now, in addition to using the performance of the animal plus its relatives as we did with blup, now we're able to actually look at what's going on and which individual snips, which individual single nucleotide polymorphisms are contributing to the differences in performance that we're seeing among animals.
Duggan notes, as soon as get a genotype on an animal, which can happen within a month of birth, we can estimate that animal's future potential as breeding stock.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.
*Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork
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