Review Article
Year: 2020 | Month: October | Volume: 7 | Issue: 10 | Pages: 41-52
Genetic Selection and Advances in Swine Breeding: A Review of its Impact on Sow’s Reproductive Traits
Ronel O. Reproto
College of Agriculture and Fisheries, Capiz State University - Pontevedra Pontevedra, Capiz 5802 Philippines
ABSTRACT
Until now, continuous selection and breeding of swine is done to take advantage of increase reproductive efficiency. Litter size at birth and weaning are important traits of interest by pig breeders as it affects farm productivity. However, factors such as uterine capacity, fetal survival, stillborn, individual birth weight, and post-natal interaction of piglets and sow limits improvement of this trait. Although continues conventional breeding and selection facilitates progress in lowly heritable reproductive traits, success has a consequence of non-uniform piglet with lower birth weight which led to increase pre - weaning mortality. Pig breeders therefore shift selection strategy from large litter size at birth to increase in litter size at weaning. On the other hand, rapid improvement in reproductive trait observed in the past decades is due to extensive effort of record keeping, conventional and genomic selection, Genome Wide Association Study/Analysis that determine potential candidate gene and use of Best Linear Unbiased Prediction (BLUP) that account the genetic merit of certain breed across generation. Innovations brought by this reproductive strategy further optimize breeding scheme efficiency which speed up genetic progress, allowing only breeds with superior reproductive traits to reproduce for the next generation. Today, it is possible to produce more than 30 piglets weaned/sow/year due to improved genetics. Further development would be expected in the future for litter size and piglets born alive with the utilization of ESR gene, crossing of Meishan to white breeds and with application of genomic selection, GWAS and BLUP.
Keywords: Reproductive traits, genetic selection, breeding, sow
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