The IMMUPIGEN project (AGL2016-75432-R) aimed to decipher the molecular basis of immunity traits in pigs with the ultimate goal of including them in pig breeding programs to produce more robust and disease resistant animals. The METAPIGEN project (PID2020-112677RB-C21) pursues the research initiated with the IMMUPIGEN project and will focus on assessing the genetic relationships of health-related traits with production performance, on identifying novel genes, transcripts, key regulators and biomarkers of immunocompetence (from transcriptomics and lipidomics data), and on the genetic and functional validation of polymorphisms identified in genes associated to health/immunity. The METAPIGSEL project (PID2023-148961OB-C21) will go beyond these results and proposes to delve into the genetic determinism of immunometabolism and energy homeostasis in pigs, aiming to select and validate the most informative genetic variants, molecular biomarkers and immunity traits involved in the phenotypic diversity of both immunocompetence and production traits. The project will generate new omics information (epigenomics) that will be integrated with previously generated biological data through systems biology approaches. Furthermore, the functional information provided by omics data will be included in prediction models to evaluate its utility for more accurate genomic prediction of immunity traits, and multi-trait selection indices for selecting immunocompetence jointly with production traits will be developed and validated through in-vivo and in-vitro experiments. | ![]() ![]() ![]() |