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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Genet.
Sec. Livestock Genomics
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fgene.2024.1498380
This article is part of the Research Topic From Genes to Traits: Understanding Phenotypic Variation in Livestock View all articles

Genomic regions and biological mechanisms underlying climatic resilience traits derived from automatically-recorded vaginal temperature in lactating sows under heat stress conditions

Provisionally accepted
Hui Wen Hui Wen 1Jay S. Johnson Jay S. Johnson 2Henrique A. Mulim Henrique A. Mulim 1Andre C. Araujo Andre C. Araujo 1Felipe E. De Carvalho Felipe E. De Carvalho 1Artur O. Rocha Artur O. Rocha 1Yijian Huang Yijian Huang 3Francesco Tiezzi Francesco Tiezzi 4Christian Maltecca Christian Maltecca 5Allan Schinckel Allan Schinckel 1Luiz Brito Luiz Brito 1*
  • 1 Department of Animal Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, United States
  • 2 Division of Animal Sciences, College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, United States
  • 3 Smithfield Premium Genetics, Raleigh, United States
  • 4 Department of Agricultural Science and Technology, Environmental Food and Forestry, School of Agriculture, University of Florence, Florence, Tuscany, Italy
  • 5 Department of Animal Science, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Climate change poses a growing threat to the livestock industry, impacting animal productivity, animal welfare, and farm management practices. Thus, enhancing livestock climatic resilience (CR) is becoming a key priority in various breeding programs. CR can be defined as the ability of an animal to be minimally affected or rapidly return to euthermia under thermally stressful conditions. The primary study objectives were to perform genome-wide association studies for 12 CR indicators derived from variability in longitudinal vaginal temperature in lactating sows under heat stress conditions. A total of 31 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) located on nine chromosomes were considered as significantly associated with nine CR indicators based on different thresholds. Among them, only two SNPs were simultaneously identified for different CR indicators, SSC6:16,449,770 bp and SSC7:39,254,889 bp. These results highlighted the polygenic nature of CR indicators with small effects distributed across different chromosomes. Furthermore, we identified 434 positional genes associated with CR. Key candidate genes include SLC3A2, STX5, POLR2G, and GANAB, which were previously related to heat stress responses, protein folding, and cholesterol metabolism. Furthermore, the enriched KEGG pathways and Gene Ontology (GO) terms associated with these candidate genes are linked to stress responses, immune and inflammatory responses, neural system, and DNA damage and repair. The most enriched quantitative trait loci are related to "Meat and Carcass", followed by "Production", "Reproduction", "Health", and "Exterior (conformation and appearance)" traits. Multiple genomic regions were identified associated with different CR indicators, which reveals that CR is a highly polygenic trait with small effect sizes distributed across the genome. Many heat tolerance or HS related genes in our study, such as HSP90AB1, DMGDH, and HOMER1, have been identified. The complexity of CR encompasses a range of adaptive responses, from behavioral to cellular. These results highlight the possibility of selecting more heat-tolerant individuals based on the identified SNP for CR indicators. × &'((*&) ! %&'((*&) "!# &'((*&) "$% %&'((*&) "!#

    Keywords: Climate resilience, Heat stress, genome-wide association studies, livestock breeding, Genomic regions

    Received: 18 Sep 2024; Accepted: 28 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Wen, Johnson, Mulim, Araujo, De Carvalho, Rocha, Huang, Tiezzi, Maltecca, Schinckel and Brito. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Luiz Brito, Department of Animal Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.