Associations of Polymorphisms in the Mx1 Gene with Immunity Traits in Large White??Meishan F2 Offspring

Abstract

The mouse myxovirus resistance protein 1 (Mx1) is known to be sufficient to confer resistance to influenza viruses, and the gene encoding Mx1 is, therefore, an interesting candidate gene for disease resistance in farm animals. The porcine Mx1 gene has already been identified and characterized based on its homology with mouse Mx1; the full-length coding region of the pig Mx1 gene spans 2,545 bp (M65087) and is organized into 17 exons compared with the human ortholog mRNA. In this study, the exons 9, 10 and 11 and introns 6 and 9 of the porcine Mx1 gene were cloned and sequenced. Two SNPs were identified in exons 9, 10 and 11 but none of the SNPs led to an amino acid exchange, and the other eleven variants were detected in introns 6 and 9, respectively. Differences in allele frequency between Meishan and other pig breeds were observed within intron 6, of which an A→G substitution at position 371 was detected as an SnaBI PCR-RFLP. The association analysis using the Large White×Meishan F 2 offspring suggested that the Mx1 genotype was associated with variation in several immunity traits that are of interest in pig breeding. However, further investigations in more populations are needed to confirm the above result.

Estimation of Interaction Effects among Nucleotide Sequence Variants in Animal Genomes

“…Now, we are confronting dramatically increasing markers resulted from animal genome projects, and such numerous data on genetic markers should be utilized to understand genetic architecture of their economic traits. Currently, genetic association studies for major livestock have been restricted to candidate gene analysis, and the association resulted form candidate gene studies were at most vague or contradictory in cattle (Kim et al, 2005;Cheong et al, 2008;Dario et al, 2008), swine (Li et al, 2007;Chen et al, 2008;Omelka et al, 2008), and chickens (Wang et al, 2006;Wang et al, 2007;Zhang et al, 2008). Recently, a genomewide association analysis was reported for cattle (Charlier et al, 2008).…”