Location: Livestock Bio-Systems
Project Number: 3040-31000-095-000-D
Project Type: In-House Appropriated
Start Date: Jul 31, 2017
End Date: May 27, 2022
Objective:
Objective 1: Improve swine production by identifying factors contributing to prenatal piglet development and survival and postnatal preweaning mortality.
Subobjective 1.A: Improve conceptus, postnatal, and preweaning survival by determining early pregnancy factors contributing to variation in fetal and postnatal development.
Subobjective 1.B: Increase piglet production by discovering fetal and postnatal development features that are influenced by uterine capacity.
Subobjective 1.C: Determine the influence of placental membrane transporters on placental and fetal development.
Objective 2: Increase productivity and longevity of replacement gilts by identifying and defining physiological and environmental factors underlying developmental and reproductive processes.
Subobjective 2.A: Improve strategies for selecting gilts by defining environmental, physiological, and metabolic factors responsible for variation in growth and reproductive efficiency.
Subobjective 2.B: Reduce failure of gilt retention through discovery of gene pathways and their interaction with physiological and environmental factors affecting the phenotypic expression of pubertal traits.
Objective 3: Enhance sow performance and retention within the breeding herd by identifying physiological and environmental features at critical periods throughout life that contribute to production and longevity.
Subobjective 3.A: Identify behavioral and environmental factors during gestation, lactation, or post-weaning periods to develop feeding strategies that improve sow reproductive performance and longevity.
Subobjective 3.B: Discover factors (microbiome profiles, metabolites, transcripts, proteins, and/or genes) within tissues or biofluids from female breeding stock for use in genomic, metabolomic, or microbiome studies to improve reproductive efficiency, piglet production, and sow longevity.
Approach:
Maximizing lifetime productivity of swine is essential to meet the ARS Grand Challenge of a 20% increase in production and a 20% reduction in environmental impact by 2025 and is a high priority research initiative of the pork industry. Lifetime productivity of swine is an extremely complex trait and our understanding of the biological mechanisms that underlie the trait or its component traits is limited. Increasing our knowledge and basic understanding of development, growth, and maintenance at all levels of swine production will impact lifetime productivity. The overarching goal is to discover physiological, metabolic, and environmental factors affecting fetal survival, piglet growth, reproductive development, and sow productivity and longevity. This will be accomplished by combining transcriptomics, metabolomics, microbiomics and other molecular biology techniques with genetic and physiological studies at the farm level. Our first objective will focus on conceptus through neonate to produce more consistent-sized, healthy piglets, subsequently reducing pre-weaning mortality and improving growth rates. Secondly, we will identify factors that contribute to young females that have greater success entering and staying in the breeding herd. Our final objective will investigate environmental and energy dynamics of mature females relating these to production and longevity. The tools and strategies developed from this project will be used to improve pork production efficiency. Maximizing lifetime productivity of swine will enhance the welfare and well-being by minimizing fetal and neonatal death, and reducing unnecessary culling of gilts and sows. Application of these results will increase the economic competitiveness of U.S. pork producers.
