Dataset Information

Selection for Duration of Fertility and Mule Duck White Plumage Colour in a Synthetic Strain of Ducks (Anas platyrhynchos).

ABSTRACT: A synthetic strain of ducks (Anas platyrhynchos) was developed by introducing genes for long duration of fertility to be used as mother of mule ducklings and a seven-generation selection experiment was conducted to increase the number of fertile eggs after a single artificial insemination (AI) with pooled Muscovy semen. Reciprocal crossbreeding between Brown Tsaiya LRI-2 (with long duration of fertility) and Pekin L-201 (with white plumage mule ducklings) ducks produced the G0. Then G1 were intercrossed to produce G2 and so on for the following generations. Each female duck was inseminated 3 times, at 26, 29, and 32 weeks of age. The eggs were collected for 14 days from day 2 after AI. Individual data regarding the number of incubated eggs (Ie), the number of fertile eggs at candling at day 7 of incubation (F), the total number of dead embryos (M), the maximum duration of fertility (Dm) and the number of hatched mule ducklings (H) with plumage colour were recorded. The selection criterion was the breeding values of the best linear unbiased prediction animal model for F. The results show high percentage of exhibited heterosis in G2 for traits to improve (19.1% for F and 12.9% for H); F with a value of 5.92 (vs 3.74 in the Pekin L-201) was improved in the G2. Heritabilities were found to be low for Ie (h (2) = 0.07±0.03) and M (h (2) = 0.07±0.01), moderately low for Dm (h (2) = 0.13±0.02), of medium values for H (h (2) = 0.20±0.03) and F (h (2) = 0.23±0.03). High and favourable genetic correlations existed between F and Dm (rg = 0.93), between F and H (rg = 0.97) and between Dm and H (rg = 0.90). The selection experiment showed a positive trend for phenotypic values of F (6.38 fertile eggs in G10 of synthetic strain vs 5.59 eggs in G4, and 3.74 eggs in Pekin L-201), with correlated response for increasing H (5.73 ducklings in G10 vs 4.86 in G4, and 3.09 ducklings in Pekin L-201) and maximum duration of the fertile period without increasing the embryo mortality rate. The average predicted genetic response for F was 40% of genetic standard deviation per generation of selection. The mule ducklings' feather colour also was improved. It was concluded that this study provided results for a better understanding of the genetics of the duration of fertility traits in the common female duck bred for mule and that the selection of a synthetic strain was effective method of improvement.

SUBMITTER: Liu HC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4412989 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Background: Skeletal muscle growth and development is highly orchestrated in gene expressions. Understanding the location-specific and breed-specific genes and pathways are agriculturally important on meat products and meat quality. In the present study, RNA-Seq was performed to elucidate the difference of muscle deposition between locations and breeds for functional genomics studies. To achieve those goals, skeletal muscle samples were collected for pectoral muscle (PM) and leg muscle (LM) of two genetically different duck breeds, Heiwu duck (H) and Peking duck (P), at embryonic 15 days. Functional genomics studies were performed in two experiments: Experiment 1 directly compared location-specific genes between PM and LM, while Experiment 2 compared the two breeds (H and P) at the same development stage (embryonic 15 days). Results: Almost 13 million clean reads was generated using Illumina technology on each library, and more than 70% reads mapped to Anas platyrhynchos breed Peking duck genome. We identified 246, 258, 20 and 54 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) (log2.fold-change >0.5, and P-value <0.05) for H-PM vs H-LM, P-PM vs P-LM, H-LM vs P-LM and H-PM vs P-PM library, separately. A total of 168 genes were differentially expressed by over locations in experiment 1, while only 8 genes were differentially expressed by over breeds in experiment 2. Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathways (KEGG) were used to functionally annotate DGEs. In experiment 1, DEGs mainly involved in Focal adhesion, PI3K-Akt signaling pathway and ECM-receptor interaction pathways (corrected P-value<0.05). In experiment 2, DEGs only associated with ribosome signal pathway (corrected P-value<0.05). In addition, quantitative real-time PCR was employed to confirm 15 differentially expressed genes detected by RNA-Seq. Conclusions: Comparative transcript analysis of leg muscle and pectoral muscle of two duck breeds not only improves our understanding of those location-specific and breed-specific genes and pathways, but also provides some candidate molecular targets for increase muscle products and meat quality by genetic control. Conclusions: Our study represents the first detailed analysis of duck breed muscle transcriptomes generated by RNA-seq technology. The optimized data analysis workflows reported here should provide a framework for comparative investigations of expression profiles. Our results show that NGS offers a comprehensive and more accurate quantitative and qualitative evaluation of mRNA content within a cell or tissue. We conclude that RNA-seq based transcriptome characterization would expedite genetic network analyses and permit the dissection of complex biologic functions.

Dataset Information

Selection for Duration of Fertility and Mule Duck White Plumage Colour in a Synthetic Strain of Ducks (Anas platyrhynchos).

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