Plasma protein levels of young healthy pigs as indicators of disease resilience
Date
2023-01-13
Authors
Chen, Yulu
Lim, Kyu-Sang
Cheng, Jian
Putz, Austin M.
Dyck, Michael K.
PigGen Canada
Fortin, Frederic
Harding, John C. S.
Plastow, Graham S.
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Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society of Animal Science
Abstract
Selection for disease resilience, which refers to the ability of an animal to maintain performance when exposed to disease, can reduce the impact of infectious diseases. However, direct selection for disease resilience is challenging because nucleus herds must maintain a high health status. A possible solution is indirect selection of indicators of disease resilience. To search for such indicators, we conducted phenotypic and genetic quantitative analyses of the abundances of 377 proteins in plasma samples from 912 young and visually healthy pigs and their relationships with performance and subsequent disease resilience after natural exposure to a polymicrobial disease challenge. Abundances of 100 proteins were significantly heritable (false discovery rate (FDR) <0.10). The abundance of some proteins was or tended to be genetically correlated (rg) with disease resilience, including complement system proteins (rg = −0.24, FDR = 0.001) and IgG heavy chain proteins (rg = −0.68, FDR = 0.22). Gene set enrichment analyses (FDR < 0.2) based on phenotypic and genetic associations of protein abundances with subsequent disease resilience revealed many pathways related to the immune system that were unfavorably associated with subsequent disease resilience, especially the innate immune system. It was not possible to determine whether the observed levels of these proteins reflected baseline levels in these young and visually healthy pigs or were the result of a response to environmental disturbances that the pigs were exposed to before sample collection. Nevertheless, results show that, under these conditions, the abundance of proteins in some immune-related pathways can be used as phenotypic and genetic predictors of disease resilience and have the potential for use in pig breeding and management.
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Comments
This article is published as Yulu Chen, Steven Lonergan, Kyu-Sang Lim, Jian Cheng, Austin M Putz, Michael K Dyck, PigGen Canada, Frederic Fortin, John C S Harding, Graham S Plastow, Jack C M Dekkers, Plasma protein levels of young healthy pigs as indicators of disease resilience, Journal of Animal Science, Volume 101, 2023, skad014, https://doi.org/10.1093/jas/skad014. © The Author(s) 2023.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.