Project Number: 5438-31000-083-05
Project Type: Trust

Start Date: May 01, 2008
End Date: Aug 30, 2009

Objective:
The objectives of the proposal are to identify the causative sequence variation in calpastatin that likely affects tenderness in commercial pig populations and develop definitive DNA markers that are predictive of pork tenderness for marker assisted selection in commercial herds.

Approach:
Because markers in calpastatin are highly associated with tenderness traits, we will resequence the calpastatin gene in boars that sire the most divergently extreme shear force values in progeny in order to identify all possible mutations that could affect tenderness and test these polymorphisms in our population and a sample of industry pigs for association.