Identifisering av gener og mutasjoner knyttet til helse og sykdomsresistens hos norske griser.

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

This project aims to identify genes and mutations that make pigs more disease-resistant. Breeding for disease resistance is difficult because it is hard to measure how healthy a pig is, and we do not know much about the genes that affect this. Increased knowledge on mutations affecting resistance will be an alternative to phenotyping because genotyping the pigs would answer how susceptible they are to diseases. Our approach combines gene expression data with genotyping data and functional testing to identify mutations related to health and disease resistance. The gene expression data will first be used in differential expression analysis to identify new genes and confirm mutations from literature. The gene expression data will thereafter be integrated with genotype data from the same animals to identify regulatory mutations. Putative regulatory mutations will be tested using an expression assay in pig cells to find the mutations with a functional effect on regulatory activity.