Researchers headed by Dr Wang Lixian at the Institute of Animal Science (IAS) of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) found that LEMD3 and WIF1 represent major biological candidates for porcine ear size, with potential application in breeding programs. This research finding has been published on PLoS ONE on July 9th, 2014.

In this study, an intercross population was constructed from the large-eared Minzhu, an indigenous Chinese pig breed, and the Western commercial Large White pig to examine the genetic basis of ear size diversity. A GWAS was performed to detect SNPs significantly associated with ear size. Thirty-five significant SNPs defined a 10.78-Mb (30.14-40.92 Mb) region on SSC5. Further, combining linkage disequilibrium and haplotype sharing analysis, a reduced region of 3.07-Mb was obtained. Finally, by using a selective sweep analysis, a critical region of about 450-kb interval containing two annotated genes LEMD3 and WIF1 was refined in this work. Functional analysis indicated that both represent biological candidates for porcine ear size, with potential application in breeding programs.


More details are available on PLoS ONE on the links bellow:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0102085