Investigation of dna methylation on porcine reference sequence genes for boar taint trait

Boar taint (BT) is an offensive flavor in non-castrated male pigs. However, studies of genome-wide DNA methylation profiles on all reference sequence genes to reveal epigenetic information associated with BT was scarce. Reduced representation bisulfite sequencing (RRBS) is an efficient technology to identify candidate epigenetic biomarkers associated with BT.

Three different BT levels were analyzed using RRBS data to calculate differentially methylated genes (DMGs). In this study, we found 411 21 DMGs (Q-value < 0.01) out of 4566 reference genes. Hyper-methylation DMGs were revealed to be mainly enriched in five significant pathways (qvalue < 0.05). These results could contribute to the understanding of methylation levels on reference sequence genes in pigs and the usage of genomic selection for low BT in the breeding programs.