IDENTIFICATION OF POLYMORPHISMS IN A REGION OF THE CHICKEN CHROMOSOME 2 ASSOCIATED WITH MUSCLE DEPOSITION

Abstract

The poultry industry is one of the sectors of agribusiness that has been largely improved in Brazil, mainly due to the development of techniques for genetic improvement. Through genetic maps saturated with markers, especially the SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms), it is possible to map quantitative trait loci (QTL) and thus identify alleles associated with the traits of economical interest. One of the most important trait is related to the muscle development, especially the breast muscle, one part of greater commercial value. The major difficulty in the selection of this trait is because it has positive correlation with the fat traits, i.e, the selection for the improvement of breast muscle, can cause the fat deposition. In order to perform the initial mapping of QTL for performance traits and carcass, it was started in 1999 in Brazil, the Chicken Genome Project, a partnership between EMBRAPA Swine and Poultry and ESALQ/USP. This project has resulted in outstanding contributions to the poultry industry , and at the moment there are high expectations of scientific advances by the use of next generation sequencing technologies , which are capable of generating highly reproducible and informative information. Therefore, this project aims to sequence the genomes of two parental lines of EMBRAPA (broiler and layer lines) for the detection of SNPs and indels (deletions/insertions) by bioinformatics tools in a target region on chromosome 2 of the chicken that was previously associated with deposition of breast muscle. Then, will be selected polymorphisms of high quality to perform the functional annotation. These results will allow the construction of a detailed catalog of polymorphisms in this region and in the future they may be validated in other populations, and the causative mutations may be identified, contributing to the Brazilian and and worldwide poultry genetic improvement.