Pleiotropic architectures of porcine immune and growth trait pairs revealed by a self‐product‐based transcriptome method

Abstract

Pleiotropy or pleiotropism is an important biological phenomenon in which one gene simultaneously controls two or more traits. There are three types of pleiotropy comprising biological, mediated and spurious pleiotropy (Solovieff et al., 2013). Pleiotropy plays essential roles in genetics, development, evolution, medicine and agriculture, but understanding of the mechanism of pleiotropy is still scarce (Wagner & Zhang, 2011). Compared with the genetic basis of a single trait, pleiotropy has a more complicated cross-trait genetic architecture, and thus its molecular and genetic dissection is more difficult. Pleiotropy research has achieved great advances and provided insights into the cross-phenotype genetic architectures of multiple complex traits. For example, numerous pleiotropic variants associated with human diseases such as autoimmune disorders, cancers and metabolic syndromes have been identified (Cotsapas et al., 2011). The pleiotropy has also been reported in a number of domesticated species, such as beef cattle (Bolormaa et al., 2014), pig (Zhang et al., 2016 and chicken (Dong et al., 2019). These investigations suggest the broad existence of pleiotropic effects on complex traits in multiple species.