Development of a metabolomic- and immunological platform as a precision phenotyping tool.

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

The project is intended to lead to new phenotypes and models to create more resilient pigs, better adapted to the international market. Resilience is the ability of the animals to recover quickly from a wide range of disruptive challenges back to the original level of normal health, fertility, and production. According to this definition it is clear that in practice, measuring and then selecting for resilience in livestock is particularly challenging. This is even more challenging in the high health, and fortunate, environment present in Norway, where natural exposure to challenging conditions is limited. The underlying idea in this project is to fill main gaps that must be addressed to be able to breed properly for improved resilience. Norsvin has high ambitions for expansion on international markets. Sustainability and high animal welfare are fundamental elements of Norsvins breeding strategy that have helped to ensure that the ambitious international effort is well on the way to success. However, due to more incidences of diseases worldwide it is essential to develop breeding programs for selection of resilience in order to keep competiveness internationally and improve animal welfare in challenged environments. The main objective of this project is therefore to enhance the ability of pigs to resist and minimize the impact of disease by developing methods to select for disease and stress resilience in a high-health nucleus breeding populations. In this project our ambition is to address these issues by using novel state of the art metabolomic tools combined with immunologic methods and bioinformatics to examine blood plasma for potential novel and known metabolic and immunologic biomarkers, and their role related to resilience. Additionally, instead of direct disease challenge on pigs, the macrophage from blood and lung will be in-vitro challenged with the most important pathogens to obtain genetic variants useful for selection.