The Ensminger Program 2010: The First School in Lleida, Spain and Other Activities in International Animal Agriculture

The Ensminger Program is an effort to improve and expand activities in international animal agriculture in the Department of Animal Science and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The program is funded by an endowment created by ME Ensminger and his wife. This program has several purposes and includes development of conferences in locations around the world, improving training and collaboration of foreign scientists and improved education and opportunities for Iowa State University undergraduates with interests in international animal agriculture. This year a very successful school was held in Lleida, Spain

Using Pig Genomic Sequence to Determine Underlying Mutations Affecting a Pig SSC17 Meat Quality QTL: New Developments

Improving pork quality is a high priority and a challenging task for the current pig industry. Because of the complicated properties of meat quality, breeding innovations for improved meat quality meat traits requires more knowledge of modern molecular and quantitative genetics than traditional breeding approaches. On the basis of previous quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping results of our research group, additional SNPs markers were further mined and QTL fine mapping was implemented. We continue to search for additional markers to explain the meat quality effects seen on chromosome 17