Experimental Verification of and Gene Polymorphisms in Different Generations of Da-Heng Broilers.

The micromolar calcium activated neutral protease and calpastatin have been widely regarded as genes related to muscle growth and meat tenderness. The objective of this study was to verify the association of SNPs of and genes with carcass and tenderness traits and search the possible change patterns of SNPs in and genes in six generations of broiler breeding process for growth rate, efficiency, and reproduction, during the third generation and the ninth generation, respectively. We found that, for , genetic effects between SNPs (G3535A, C7198A) and meat tenderness were similar in different generations, while SNP3 (G7324A) was a novel polymorphism and had significant association with carcass and tenderness traits ( < 0.05) in this study. Furthermore, there was significant association between SNP4 (G9950A) and carcass indexes instead of tenderness traits ( < 0.05) which was consistent in the two generations. Moreover, although SNP6 (G37868A) of had no relevance to carcass traits or tenderness traits in the third generation, it showed significant association with LW and CW in the ninth generation ( < 0.05).