Research Information System
ZUCHTUNGSKUNDE, vol.84, no.5, pp.1, 2012 (SCI-Expanded)
Within the European Union, it can be expected that surgical castration without anaesthesia will be banned until 2018. Besides immunocastration and surgical castration with anaesthesia, fattening of entire males seems to be an attractive alternative. However, a broad expansion of this practise is problematic due to boar taint which is mainly caused by the pheromone androstenone and bacteria degradation product skatole. Because of high heritabilities of both components, breeding against boar taint should be successful.Due to lack of certain thresholds for androstenone, a precise definition of the breeding objective is difficult. Human nose scoring is less influenced by the problem of threshold determination. However, in order to integrate the results of human nose scoring into the breeding procedure, it is necessary to define clear guidelines for recording. Breeding against androstenone is impaired by the unfavourable correlation particular to maternal fertility. Although this antagonism is not obvious in some commercial populations, only selection within sire lines is feasible, whereas breeding against androstenone in dam lines is not recommendable. Molecular genetic tools enable to identify genes, involved only in the degradation, but not in the synthesis of androstenone. In other words, there are no pleiotropic effects of these genes on androstenone and fertility. Recent studies confirm the existence of such non-pleiotropic genes. Therefore selection against androstenone could be applied efficiently without negative consequences on maternal fertility.