A novel non-synonymous SNP of the COLX gene and its association with duck reproductive traits.

Type X collagen (COLX) is a known marker of chondrocyte hypertrophy, which is exclusively expressed in hypertrophic chondrocytes and is reported to be involved in the process of mineralization. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between COLX genotypes of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) and reproductive traits of Tsaiya ducks. A total of 336 Brown Tsaiya ducks from two lines, the control line (CL) with no selection and the selected line (SL), were employed for testing. We employed polymerase chain reaction -single strand conformation polymorphism and DNA sequencing to screen the polymorphisms of the COLX gene. One novel non-synonymous SNP in coding region (T74C: Val24Ala) of the COLX gene was found, and resulted in 3 genotypes TT, TC, and CC. The frequencies of genotype TT and allele T were high in both lines. Regarding egg weight at 40 weeks of age (EW40), based on SNP-trait association analysis, ducks with the CC genotype had a 4.09 and 4.15 g/egg lower EW40 as compared with ducks with the TT and TC genotypes in the CL, respectively (P < 0.05). In addition, significant positive dominance effect of 2.10 ± 1.05 g/egg for EW40 was detected (P = 0.0481). This finding indicated that selection for the genotype TT and TC ducks might contribute to an improved egg weight in the Tsaiya ducks. Further investigations on more duck populations with large sample sizes are needed to confirm.