Genetic parameters and genome-wide association study of hyperpigmentation of the visceral peritoneum in chickens

BMC Genomics

Research Article

Yan Wang¹  Jie Wang¹  Dingming Shu¹  Hao Qu¹  Chunyu Li¹  Jie Ma¹  Chenglong Luo¹  Chunfen Yang¹  Xiaoxiang Hu²  Ning Li² 

[1] Institute of Animal Science, Guangdong Academy of Agricultural Sciences, 1 Dafeng 1st Street, Wushan, Tianhe District, 510640, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China;State Key Laboratory of Livestock and Poultry Breeding, 510640, Guangzhou, China;State Key Laboratory for Agro-Biotechnology, China Agricultural University, 100193, Beijing, China;

关键词: Newcastle Disease Virus;    Single Nucleotide Polymorphism Marker;    Visceral Peritoneum;    Significant Single Nucleotide Polymorphism;    Immune Trait;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2164-14-334

 received in 2013-02-01, accepted in 2013-05-07,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundHyperpigmentation of the visceral peritoneum (HVP) has recently garnered much attention in the poultry industry because of the possible risk to the health of affected animals and the damage it causes to the appearance of commercial chicken carcasses. However, the heritable characters of HVP remain unclear. The objective of this study was to investigate the genetic parameters of HVP by genome-wide association study (GWAS) in chickens.ResultsHVP was found to be influenced by genetic factors, with a heritability score of 0.33. HVP had positive genetic correlations with growth and carcass traits, such as leg muscle weight (rg = 0.34), but had negative genetic correlations with immune traits, such as the antibody response to Newcastle disease virus (rg = −0.42). The GWAS for HVP using 39,833 single nucleotide polymorphisms indicated the genetic factors associated with HVP displayed an additive effect rather than a dominance effect. In addition, we determined that three genomic regions, involving the 50.5–54.0 Mb region of chicken (Gallus gallus) chromosome 1 (GGA1), the 58.5–60.5 Mb region of GGA1, and the 10.5–12.0 Mb region of GGA20, were strongly associated (P < 6.28 × 10-7) with HVP in chickens. Variants in these regions explained >50% of additive genetic variance for HVP. This study also confirmed that expression of BMP7, which codes for a bone morphogenetic protein and is located in one of the candidate regions, was significantly higher in the visceral peritoneum of Huiyang Beard chickens with HVP than in that of chickens without pigmentation (P < 0.05).ConclusionsHVP is a quantitative trait with moderate heritability. Genomic variants resulting in HVP were identified on GGA1 and GGA20, and expression of the BMP7 gene appears to be upregulated in HVP-affected chickens. Findings from this study should be used as a basis for further functional validation of candidate genes involved in HVP.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Luo et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.