By Toyoto Maruyama
The pig gut microbiome consists of a diverse community of microorganisms, including bacteria, viruses, and fungi, that can influence traits such as growth and feed efficiency.
In this study, we aim to investigate whether adding information on the pig microbiome could improve the accuracy of predicting pigs’ breeding values for several finishing traits, such as backfat, carcass, feed intake, average daily gain, and loin depth.
We found that the phenotypic variation explained by the microbiome for those traits accounted for approximately 30%. When this information was used for breeding value estimation, except for backfat carcass, we could increase the prediction accuracy by up to 21%.
A better understanding of how to model and account for this type of information can help us increase the accuracy of selecting more effective finishers.
