Plant & Animal Genomes XIV Conference

January 14-18, 2006
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

From Genome Scan To Fine Mapping To Sequence Information: Steps Towards The Clarification Of The Mechanisms Controlling Porcine Chromosome 17 QTL For Meat Quality

Antonio M Ramos¹ , Zhi-Liang Hu¹ , Sean Humphray² , Jane Rogers² , Jim Reecy¹ , Max F Rothschild¹

¹  Department of Animal Science and Center for Integrated Animal Genomics, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, 50011, USA

²  The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SA, UK

The last decade proved fertile for studies that identified numerous QTL for a variety of economically important traits for the swine industry. The identification of the underlying mutations responsible for these QTL is challenging but necessary to allow the utilization of these QTL in modern pig breeding schemes. Fine mapping of the QTL of interest has begun in the relevant region by adding genetic markers and increasing the marker density to the linkage map. As new maps are obtained, new QTL analyses are then performed. However, an extremely valuable tool is the full DNA sequence of the region where specific QTL are located. A highly contiguous, integrated BAC physical map of the porcine genome has been completed by members of the Swine Genome Sequencing Consortium. This resource allows the selection of a minimally overlapping tilepath of BAC clones covering the entire genome as well as specific QTL regions. A BAC tilepath spanning the meat quality QTL on chromosome 17 has recently been selected and sequenced by the Sanger Institute. With the high quality finished sequence information becoming available it is now possible to look for polymorphisms, insertions, deletions and gene candidates, which will ultimately lead to the identification of the control mechanisms of swine QTL. The approach and the added value of the sequence can be illustrated with this example of a QTL on chromosome 17.