THE RN LOCUS FOR MEAT QUALITY MAPS TO PIG CHROMOSOME-15

An experiment was initiated in 1990 to study the RN locus, which has been shown to exert a major effect on a measurement of meat quality in pigs, the Napole technological yield (RTN). The animals used originated from a composite line (Laconie). Thirteen reference families of double backcross type (RN(-)/rn(+) x rn(+)/rn(+)) were selected to search for a marker of the RN locus. The present study gives the results obtained on a sample of 220 offspring for which the RN allele coming from the heterozygous parent was considered as known after a segregation analysis of RTN data. A systematic approach was applied to identify markers linked to RN, using a panel of 63 microsatellite markers, which are informative in those families for 1700 cM of the pig genome. The analysis of allelic segregations allowed the mapping of the RN locus to chromosome 15 at a distance of 18 cM from the marker S0088.