Breeding for resilience: new opportunities in a modern pig breeding program
B. Harlizius, P. K. Mathur, E.F. Knol
Abstract
Modern pig breeding schemes evaluate a large number of traits on specialized purebred breeding lines to improve the genetic makeup of crossbred animals used for pork production, but also for the next generation of purebred breeding animals. Much progress has been made regarding breeding for production and reproduction traits through the use of genomic information. However, pure line breeding is done under high health conditions for sanitary and trade reasons and the genetic variation in the group of traits around resilience is not fully exploited. Resilience in the narrow sense of reactions upon infectious diseases is defined as the ability to maintain performance, regardless of pathogen burden (Mulder and Rashidi, 2017). This includes the ability of an animal to maintain performance under infection or to rapidly return to prior performance levels after infection. This can be due to resistance or tolerance or a combination of both. Resilience in a broader sense can also include this reaction in performance upon environmental challenges such as changes in diet, social grouping, or management procedures (Colditz and Hine, 2016). Urruty et al. (2016) defines resilience as the ability to absorb change and to anticipate future perturbations through adaptive capacity.