article · Animal Biotechnology
Animal growth regulation, body composition, and meat quality are strongly interrelated and represent primary targets for rabbit breeders. Identifying the genetic factors governing these characteristics, alongside the relationships among the relevant genes, offers an opportunity to shift rabbit breeding away from classical methods towards modern molecular techniques. This review examines several candidate genes and mutations that influence growth, carcass performance, and meat quality traits. Incorporating these identified markers into marker-assisted selection programmes can accelerate genetic improvement strategies, particularly for local breeds in developing countries, provided the markers account for a reasonable proportion of the additive genetic variance. Finally, the work highlights the critical requirement for further research to explore additional candidate genes across diverse production traits.
Enhancing rabbit meat production requires effective breeding strategies. Transitioning from traditional breeding methods to marker-assisted selection allows breeders to target specific genetic traits for faster progress. By identifying the genes that govern growth and meat quality, breeding programmes can be modernised, which is especially valuable for improving the productivity and performance of local rabbit stocks in developing countries.
The findings are relevant to animal breeding enterprises and livestock programmes seeking to establish marker-assisted selection tools for rabbits. The application lies in molecular breeding to improve growth and carcass performance, particularly in local breeds. Because the work is a review identifying candidate genes and noting the need for further research, it represents an early-stage pathway that requires additional validation before direct commercial deployment.
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Growth and meat production are the most relevant targets for animal breeders, there are strong relationships between animal growth regulation, body composition and meat quality. Therefore, it is essential to identify the genetic factors that are controlling growth, carcass, and meat quality traits and to explore the correlations between identified genes of those traits. Identification of candidate genes may shift rabbit breeding from classical to modern approaches, which offer great potential to accelerate genetic improvement plans, especially in developing countries. The current work reviews several genes and mutations affecting growth, carcass and meat quality traits. These candidate genes and mutations can be incorporated into MAS programs to improve rabbit breeds especially local breeds, provided that a reasonable proportion of trait additive genetic variance is explained by the significant marker. Furthermore, we highlighted the indispensable need for more researches investigating candidate genes for different traits.
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DOI: 10.1080/10495398.2021.1908315
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