Performing Department
Animal Science
Non Technical Summary
Pork is the most-consumed meat globally, consumption of which is expected to increase over the next decades with international population and income growth. To keep up with demand and provide global food security and safety, pork producers must employ further technological innovation to increase production sustainably. Infectious disease is one of the largest costs associated with pork production and one of the most difficult to manage. In addition, infectious disease in pork production impedes animal welfare, can impact human health and contributes to poor public perception of animal production in terms of animal welfare, food safety and antimicrobial resistance. Although biosecurity and vaccination protocols help to reduce the incidence of disease, maintaining a disease-free status in pork production is not feasible. Thus, additional strategies to reduce the incidence and impact of disease are needed. Disease resilience refers to the ability of an animal to sustain performance in the face of general disease challenge and is determined in part by host genetics. However, genetic selection for improved disease resilience is hampered by the inability to directly measure disease resistance or resilience in the nucleus breeding populations that drive genetic improvement because they are by necessity kept under high biosecurity and face limited disease pressures. New high-throughput phenomic and genomics approaches provide unique prospects to develop measures that can be taken on healthy animals at a young age that are predictive of resistance and resilience when phased with disease in a production environment, which is the overall goal of this proposal. Achievement of this goal will increase the international competitiveness and productivity of the US pork industry and its contributions to global food safety/security by developing genetic improvement strategies that reduce pig deaths and morbidity, and improve production efficiency and animal welfare. This project builds on and complements our previous and ongoing work on resistance to PRRS and PCV2, yet is novel in focusing on overall disease resilience, rather than resistance to specific disease. This project also leverages and builds on a recently initiated and ongoing large-scale international research program that is funded by Genome Alberta, Genome Canada and a consortium of 7 breeding organizations with major market shares in the US, in which 3500 North American commercial crossbred pigs are evaluated for resilience during nursery-grow-finish in a research environment that mimics a production environment with high disease pressure based on natural challenge. The environment that has been created allows for optimal expression of disease resilience, which is being captured by deep phenotyping during grow-finish, including individual daily body weights, feed and water intake, along with disease incidence, mortality, and morbidity. We will use this already established and funded program to apply deep phenotyping approaches on samples collected on all pigs prior to natural challenge, which mimic the non-evasive phenotypes that can be collected on healthy animals in a nucleus breeding program at a young age. Phenotypes collected include high-throughput approaches to interrogate the blood transcriptome, metabolome and proteome, as well as the microbiome of fecal swabs, and in-vitro measures of immune response using blood. These phenotypes will complement additional immune response measures that are being collected through the already funded project. The resulting comprehensive deep phenotypes will be used to develop predictors of disease resilience at both the genetic and phenotypic level. Genetic analyses will be enhanced by utilizing 80k SNP genotypes that will be available on all pigs, allowing for the development of whole genome-enabled selection programs, which is ideal for the use of this information in high-health nucleus breeding programs. Deliverables include methods and tools to evaluate and optimize resilience to disease and strategies for end users to integrate into their programs. Project deliverables will lead to economic benefits for the US through improved performance, lower medication costs, increased international demand for North American breeding stock, and possibly an increase in domestic and export market share owing to consumer preference for pork from higher health and welfare pigs. Producers will derive financial benefits from higher productivity, better market penetration and genetics. Other benefits include a healthier and safer food chain, and vast knowledge generation and translation. End-user recipients such as in particular breeding organizations, are all engaged in the research to ensure the deliverables are transferred directly into the hands of the breeding industry, which will ensure rapid implementation.
Animal Health Component
50%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
0%
Applied
100%
Developmental
0%
Goals / Objectives
The overall goal of this project to enhance the ability of pigs to resist and minimize the impact of disease by developing methods to select for disease resilience in high-health nucleus breeding populations.Specific objectives are to:Determine the genetic control of in-vitro immune assay-based phenotypes conducted on blood from young healthy animals as potential predictors of resilience of pigs to disease.Determine the genetic control of transcriptome, metabolome, and proteome profiles of blood from young healthy animals as potential predictors of resilience of pigs to disease.Determine the genetic control of the gut microbiome of young healthy animals as potential predictors of resilience of pigs to disease.Develop and evaluate the use of integrated deep phenotypes obtained on blood from healthy pigs as predictors of resilience to disease using genome-enabled selection.
Project Methods
This project builds on an ongoing large-scale international research program that is funded by Genome Alberta, Genome Canada and a consortium of 7 breeding organizations with major market shares in the US, in which 3500 North American commercial crossbred pigs are evaluated for resilience during nursery-grow-finish in a research environment that mimics a production environment with high disease pressure based on natural challenge. The environment that has been created allows for optimal expression of disease resilience, which is being captured by deep phenotyping during grow-finish, including individual daily body weights, feed and water intake, along with disease incidence, mortality, and morbidity. We will use this already established and funded program to apply deep phenotyping approaches on samples collected on 960 pigs prior to natural challenge, which mimic the non-evasive phenotypes that can be collected on healthy animals in a nucleus breeding program at a young age. Phenotypes collected include high-throughput approaches to interrogate the blood transcriptome, metabolome and proteome, as well as the microbiome of fecal swabs, and in-vitro measures of immune response using blood. These phenotypes will complement additional immune response measures that are being collected through the already funded project. The resulting comprehensive deep phenotypes will be used to develop predictors of disease resilience at both the genetic and phenotypic level. Genetic analyses will be enhanced by utilizing 80k SNP genotypes that will be available on all pigs, allowing for the development of whole genome-enabled selection programs, which is ideal for the use of this information in high-health nucleus breeding programs.