Genetics of keel bone allocation in relation to welfare

Bone health is among the largest welfare issues that currently exists for commercial chickens, and in particular laying hens. As such, it is imperative that novel methods are used to ameliorate these effects.

The causes of this decline in bone health is due to a number of factors – it is intrinsically linked to egg production, but housing types can also have an impact, whilst genotype can have an inordinately large effect.

Commercial flocks are often plagued by relatively low genetic diversity, therefore beneficial alleles that reside in wild or landrace breeds could be important supplements to their commercial counterparts. This will be performed using mapping experiments in a variety of outbred Landrace breeds and intercrosses.

We will assess these novel intercrosses using a Gene x Environment framework to identify alleles that have the greatest impact in the particular environment of choice (both free-range and standard cages).

To fine-map these loci and to identify the specific cell types, a combination of single cell transcriptomic and epigenomic ATAC-sequencing will be performed.

Finally, using an industry collaboration with Hendrix Genetics, these results will be used to interrogate the identified regions and polymorphisms in two commercial layer lines to enable these results to be integrated in their ongoing selection program, and also perform an introgression experiment using the novel alleles identified to test the feasibility of augmenting commercial lines.