Status quo: 19 November, 2009

Objective
To develop and apply new and appropriate molecular control tools by omics methods in the production of pork (both for the primary producers and the slaughterhouses).

The research is carried out in three work packages: to develop biomarkers that can be used to improve pork quality in all segments of the pork production chains (WP V.1), to validate and further develop tools developed in WP. V.1 into ready–to-use tests, which can be directly applied by the industry in the pork production chains (WP V.2) and to identify genes controlling adipose and muscle biology in relation to pork quality in order to improve our understanding of the regulation of pork quality in diverse production system (WP V.3).

Initially we have sampled muscle and fat tissue libraries. This was done from 2 experiments carried out in DK and FR, respectively: To obtain a large variation in meat quality traits one experiment (DK) examined the effect of physical stress (treadmill running) and the other the effect of breed and production system (FR). Besides muscle biochemical traits, meat quality traits describing the technological quality, meat is also examined by sensory quality. These experiments have been concluded. Sampling was also performed on several commercial lines including Polish Pulawska and Chinese Tongchen and several European breeds. The latter commercial chains were analyzed for a subset of meat quality traits listed in M.V.1.2 encompassing drip loss, colour, intramuscular fat, shear force, pH, and meat temperature. Muscle samples from many of these pork chains are being analyzed for global analyses of genes (micro-array) and proteins (proteomics) in pigs from these chains. In the stress experiment blood was also examined by NMR for blood metabolites in relation to meat quality traits.

At present relationships/associations between meat quality traits and omics are analyzed by bioinformatics tools. In the project we anticipate that we will find some genes of unknown functions. To study this we are using siRNA technologies to knock-out unknown genes and look at their function in primary porcine satellite cell culture. The next step is to confirm gene-expression found by micro-array by PCR analysis which was started in the previous period. Furthermore, we started work to validate the results on other pork chains.

In the period to come we will further study associations among omics and meat quality traits, confirmation, and validation of global analyses.

 

Main results:

Stress experiments: exercise running deteriorated meat quality like drip loss and shear force. Several associations between proteomic profile and meat quality were found. A large variation in technological and sensory quality traits were found between breeds in the INRA experiments and furthermore many associations among proteomic and transcriptomics were found.