Omics Application in Animal Science—A Special Emphasis on Stress Response and Damaging Behaviour in Pigs

Abstract

Increasing stress resilience of livestock is important for ethical and profitable meat and dairy production. Susceptibility to stress can entail damaging behaviours, a common problem in pig production. Breeding animals with increased stress resilience is difficult for various reasons. First, studies on neuroendocrine and behavioural stress responses in farm animals are scarce, as it is difficult to record adequate phenotypes under field conditions. Second, damaging behaviours and stress susceptibility are complex traits, and their biology is not yet well understood. Dissecting complex traits into biologically better defined, heritable and easily measurable proxy traits and developing biomarkers will facilitate recording these traits in large numbers. High-throughput molecular technologies (“omics”) study the entirety of molecules and their interactions in a single analysis step. They can help to decipher the contributions of different physiological systems and identify candidate molecules that are representative of different physiological pathways. Here, we provide a general overview of different omics approaches and we give examples of how these techniques could be applied to discover biomarkers. We discuss the genetic dissection of the stress response by different omics techniques and we provide examples and outline potential applications of omics tools to understand and prevent outbreaks of damaging behaviours.

Domestic animal proteomics in the 21st century: A global retrospective and viewpoint analysis

“…The adaptation mechanisms of small ruminant goat breeds against weight loss during dry seasons has been extensively described using proteomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics [10,91,92]. Similarly, pig breeds answer differently to high temperature-humidity indexes, which has been supported by differential gene expression results [93]. The application of Omics has enabled the finding of pathways related to susceptibility and resilience to these stressors, which may help establish more resistant and productive strains.…”

“…Applications could include for instance the use of alternative feedstuffs such as algae [94] or insect meal, monitoring ruminal fermentation manipulation through the animal diets [76] or contribute to a more sustainable extensive production system highlighting the benefits also for product quality [8]. These, together with improvements towards the increase of animal welfare for instance in damaging behavior of pigs [93] or in cattle by characterizing heat stress effects [52,53], are areas where the contributions of proteomics is crucial.…”

Prospects for the Analysis and Reduction of Damaging Behaviour in Group-Housed Livestock, With Application to Pig Breeding

“…The area of this article is quantitative genetics. For recent reviews of molecular genetic studies of damaging behaviour, see Brunberg et al ( 2016 ) and Kasper et al ( 2020 ). We first describe the evidence for genetic effects and genotype × environment interactions influencing damaging behaviour.…”

Genetic Regulation of Biomarkers as Stress Proxies in Dairy Cows

“…Responses to stress are highly complex and cannot easily be measured; therefore, identifying biological processes that act as proxy traits and finding quantifiable biomarkers for stress will accelerate the scientific understanding of stress responses and facilitate the selection for more resilient animals [ 17 , 18 , 19 ]. Stress results in the activation of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, which triggers the release of catecholamines such as epinephrine, norepinephrine and glucocorticoids.…”