Collaborative Effort to Identify Genes Involved with Bone Related Traits in Broiler Chickens

The Brazilian poultry industry has been rapidly growing in the past few decades. Since 1973 chicken meat production increased from 273,000 to 13.2 million tones, and a per-capita consumption from 2.3 to 47.4kg. Worldwide increase in chicken consumption has forced the poultry industry to intensify production by increasing the efficiency of animals. Genetic selection applied to produce a Faster-Growing-Chicken led to negative effects on locomotor and metabolic functions. Problems associated with bone integrity are seen in higher frequency than in the past and are generating economics losses to producers and industry. In addition, health issues are strong indicators of poor animal welfare. In an effort to reduce those issues, the industry started a more intensive selection process; however the genetic gain to improve the skeletal structure is still inefficient. Recently the Brazilian Government in a partnership with CAPES and CNPq proposed a program designed to attract young scientists (Science Without Borders Program - BJT) to conduct outstanding research in Brazil. One of the funded grants is a collaborative project of two important research organizations, Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) and University of São Paulo (ESALQ/USP). The objective of our BJT grant (400606/2012-7) is to apply newly developed approaches as RNA-Seq to identify differentially expressed genes, isoforms and polymorphisms related to locomotor problems in broilers. Our findings will be used to conduct a more effective selective tools to decrease the incidence of bone-related problems, increase the animal welfare, and finally, use the developed methods as a model for other animal species.