Associations between genetic variants and gene expression in porcine blood

The transcriptome can be used as an intermediary phenotype in the search for biomarkers. In the present study we aimed to find associations between genomic variability and gene expression levels of porcine blood in order to evaluate their biomarker potential.
For this reason blood was collected from 255 commercial Durocs at age 60 days. Animals were genotiped using a GGP Porcine HD Array (Illumina) and imputed to whole genome sequencing level using the PigGTEx reference population. Blood RNA-seq was performed in order to obtain gene-expression levels.
Then expression Genome Wide Association Studies were performed between the resulting 8,499,177 variants and 14,642 expressed genes. Finding more than 23 million significant associations across 6,051 genes.
The results of this technique highlight several potential biomarkers of genetic determinsim of pig gene-expression levels in blood.