The RN locus for meat quality maps to pig chromosome 15

Abstract

An experiment was initiated in 1990 to study the RN locus, which has been shown to exert a major effect on a measurement of meat quality in pigs, the Napole technological yield (RTN). The animals used originated from a composite line (Laconie). Thirteen reference families of double backcross type (RN- /rn+ × rn+/rn+) were selected to search for a marker of the RN locus. The present study gives the results obtained on a sample of 220 offspring for which the RN allele coming from the heterozygous parent was considered as known after a segregation analysis of RTN data. A systematic approach was applied to identify markers linked to RN, using a panel of 63 microsatellite markers, which are informative in those families for 1 700 cM of the pig genome. The analysis of allelic segregations allowed the mapping of the RN locus to chromosome 15 at a distance of 18 cM from the marker S0088. © 1995 Elsevier/INRA.