Authors : Huo Jinlong, Huo Hailong, Wang Pei, Zeng Yangzhi and Xiao Heng
Abstract: In 1980, the Banna Mini-pig Inbred line was established in China. The original ancestors were a sow and her son with the same black color coats. The propagation was conducted by full sibling or parent-offspring mating. With the development of inbreeding, white with black spotting individuals were generated. In the study, a principal coat color encoded candidate gene of MC1R was studied from the typical 8 generation of BMI for revealing the genetic mechanism. It was shown that BMI owned two MC1R alleles named EBMI and Ebmi, corresponding to EU604026 and EU604027 in GenBank. Genotypes of EBMI/EBMI and EBMI/Ebmi were black color while the white with black spotting phenotype owned the Ebmi/Ebmi genotype. The EBMI with the length of 963 bp single-coding exon encodes 320 amino acids. Compared with the EBMI sequence, 2 bp was inserted in the 66th nucleotide position of the Ebmi encoding regions. The insertion caused a frameshift mutation that introduced a premature stop at codon 55, encoding 54 amino acids. It was indicated that the MC1R gene played a key role in the genetic process of the BMI coat color and the dominant of BMI black phenotype to white with black spotting phenotype was confirmed by the combination the pedigree phenotype deduction and genotype testing.
Huo Jinlong, Huo Hailong, Wang Pei, Zeng Yangzhi and Xiao Heng, 2012. The Association of MC1R Gene with Coat Color of Banna Mini-Pig Inbred Line (BMI). Journal of Animal and Veterinary Advances, 11: 503-508.