Genetic Determination of Serum Lipid Concentrations in Pigs

Investigation of the genomic architecture of porcine lipid traits has potential applications in biomedicine as a clinical model. With regard to atherosclerosis, the presence of vascular lesions in aortas from slaughtered pigs was observed more than five decades ago. Indeed, it has ben demonstrated that cloned pigs fed with a high fat-high cholesterol diet experience a 40-fold increase in aortic fatty streak lesion as well as 6- and 11-fold increases in total cholesterol and LDL concentrations, respectively. Despite the obvious parallelisms between pig and human atherosclerosis, the genetic basis of porcine serum lipoprotein composition has been scarcely studied. The main goal of the current study was to identify genomic regions that influence serum lipid concentrations in pigs. A total of 350 Duroc pigs were typed with the the PorcineSNP60 BeadChip (Illumina) and the PLINK software was used to investigate their association with total cholesterol (TC), low-density lipoprotein (LDL), high-density lipoprotein (HDL) and triglyceride (TG) serum concentrations at two ages (45 and 190 days). This approach allowed us to identify genome-wide associations for TG concentrations at 45 days (SSC14) and 190 days (SSC6), and diverse chromosome-wide significant associations for TC and LDL at 190 days (SSC1 and SSC3) as well as for TG at 190 days (SSC6 and SSC7). Other associations worth to mention were those found for  LDL (SSC3) and TG (SSC7) concentrations at 45 days. This positional information will be used in the search of the causal mutations explaining serum lipid variation in pigs.