A challenge of selection for disease resilience is that it is difficult to directly select pigs that have greater resilience to multiple diseases in the healthy nucleus herd environment which is essential for breeding programs. A possible alternative is to select an indicator trait or marker that can be measured in a healthy setting, is heritable, and is associated with the genetics of disease resilience. In this study, we investigated plasma protein levels measured on young healthy pigs as indicator traits to select for disease resilience. For this purpose, we used plasma proteome data collected prior to the natural exposure of nursery pigs to multiple diseases, performed phenotypic and genetic quantitative analyses, and investigated their relationships with disease resilience. Our results suggest that plasma protein levels of young healthy pigs have the potential as biomarkers to select for disease resistance.

Read the full article in the Journal of Animal Science.