By Kristine H. Martinsen
In pig production, resilience is an individual’s ability to cope or recover rapidly from a wide range of disruptive challenges back to the original level of normal health, fertility, and production. However, recording resilience in nucleus herds is challenging, as the health status is high, and natural disease challenges rarely occur.
To find new methods for measuring resilience on our selection candidates, the main goal of this study was to investigate potential bio markers for resilience to disease and investigate potential genetic variation in these markers. Analyses showed that different bio markers in the animals’ blood are heritable, however we did not find any significant genetic correlations to other resilience related traits, like variation in feed intake. The results suggests that it is possible to breed for specific biomarkers, but we did not identify a significant link to animal resilience in the current study, and further analyses are needed.
