Overall, the newly detected SNPs and newly identified candidate genes in our study added new information about the genetic architectures of growth and fatness traits in pigs, and have the potential to be applied to the pig breeding program in the future. Notably, ARL15 and PARN were associated with AGE near the dominance association signals. In total, six important functional genes (NPAS3, USP16, PARN, ARL15, GPC3, ABHD4) near significant SNPs were identified as candidate genes associated with AGE or BF. For the trait BF, three genome-wide significant additive SNPs were detected, but no significant SNP was found for the dominance effect. Using a GWAS model accounting for both additive and dominance effects, we identified three additive and two dominance significant SNPs for the trait AGE.
Our results showed significant non-zero variance for the dominance effect of AGE, while the dominance effect of BF was not significant. The Big Five remain relatively stable throughout most of one’s lifetime.
Individuals can fall anywhere on the continuum for each trait. The pigs were from three breeding farms of China and were genotyped by an in-house designed 50k SNP chip. The Big Five personality traits are extraversion (also often spelled extroversion), agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. In this study, we performed GWAS and genetic parameters estimation for the two traits age at 100 kg (AGE) and backfat thickness at 100 kg (BF) of 3572 Large White pigs. However, dominance effects are usually ignored in the genome-wide association study (GWAS) of complex traits for farm animals. Quantitative traits such as growth traits in farm animals have been found to be influenced by dominance effects. The dominance effect is a kind of non-additive effect due to the interaction between alleles at the same locus.