The role of local adaptation in sustainable production of village chickens

Village chickens are ubiquitous in smallholder farming systems, contributing to household, local and national economies under diverse environmental, economic and cultural settings. However, they are raised in challenging environments where productivity is low while mortality is high. There is much interest in utilizing indigenous genetic resources to produce a chicken resilient to its environment, whilst providing the basis of an economically sustainable enterprise. Globally, however, a wide variety of interventions have so far proved unable to deliver sustainable improvements. Here, we show that regional differences in trait preferences and parasite burden are associated with distinct chicken genepools, likely in response to interacting natural and human-driven (economic and social) selection pressures. Drivers of regional differences include marketing opportunities, cultural preferences, agro-ecologies and parasite populations, and are evident in system adaptations, such as management practices, population dynamics and bird genotypes. Our results provide sound multidisciplinary evidence to support previous observations that sustainable poultry development interventions for smallholder farmers, including breeding programs, should be locally tailored and designed for flexible implementation

Genomic composition factors affect codon usage in porcine genome

The objective of the study was to determine the codon usage bias in the porcine genome and decipher its determinants. To investigate the underlying mechanisms of codon bias, the coding sequence (CDS) from the swine reference sequence (ssc10.2) was extracted using Biomart. An in house built Perl script was used to derive various genomic traits and codon indices. Analysis was done using R statistical package, and correlations and multivariate regressions were performed. We report the existence of codon usage bias that might suggest existence of weak translational selection. The codon bias is feebly related to nucleotide composition (GC%, GC3, CDS length). This study can be explored for designing degenerate primers, necessitate selecting appropriate hosts expression systems to manipulate the expression of target genes in vivo or in vitro and improve the accuracy of gene prediction from genomic sequences thus maximizing the effectiveness of genetic manipulations in synthetic biology.Key words: Coding sequence, synomynous codons, selection, translational mutation, pig genom