Leticia Sanglard, a PhD candidate at Iowa State University, was honored with the coveted Lauren L. Christian Memorial Graduate Student Award from the National Swine Improvement Federation (NSIF) on Dec. 3. Sanglard’s research evaluates potential novel traits that can be used to genetically improve litter size traits is commercial F1 sows.
Sanglard was honored with a $500 award and recognized before industry leaders during the NSIF annual meeting as an outstanding swine animal breeding and genetics graduate student. She presented a 30-minute seminar on her research during the virtual meeting.
“NSIF wants to encourage and reward students for their commitment to sound genetic principles and for the discovery of new concepts concerning genetic improvement,” says Doug Newcom, vice president of global technical service at the National Swine Registry and NSIF award committee chairman.
Sanglard thanks the National Swine Improvement Federation for honoring her with the 2020 Lauren L. Christian Memorial Graduate Student Award.
During Sanglard’s presentation, she shared how litter size traits are challenging for genetic selection due to their low heritability. Because of this, she said the identification of an indicator trait that is highly heritable and highly genetically correlated with litter size traits could be used to obtain a faster indirect genetic progress for litter size traits.
A previous study proposed the use of antibody (Ab) response as an indicator trait for litter size traits in sows during a Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS) outbreak. However, waiting for a PRRS outbreak to collect data for genetic selection purposes is not efficient. In her study, Sanglard evaluated if Ab response data collected in PRRS-vaccinated animals would also result in the same relationship as previously seeing in sows during a PRRS outbreak.
Using over 900 F1 gilts from two commercial farms vaccinated using a commercial PRRS modified live vaccine, Sanglard and colleagues showed that Ab response collected about 52 days after PRRS vaccination is moderate to highly heritable (0.38).
“After following these animals for subsequent farrowing performance, they reported high favorable genetic correlations with litter size traits, such as for number of piglets born alive (NBA) at first parity (0.61). This result suggests that selection for increased Ab response to PRRS vaccination should result in greater genetic gains for NBA compared to direct selection for increased NBA,” Sanglard noted.
She also shared that a genomic region on chromosome 7 on pigs, namely the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) region, explains about 30% of the genetic variation for Ab response to PRRS vaccination and over 10% for several litter size traits.
Sanglard demonstrated that Ab response to PRRS vaccination can be accurately predicted using genetic markers. The results provided in her research show how Ab response to PRRS vaccination, an easy trait to be collected in commercial F1 gilts, can be used as an efficient indicator trait to increase genetic gains for litter size traits.
“This is the first concrete example of the development of a novel trait that can be used for selection of PRRS-resilient animals with improved sow productivity,” says Nick Serão, assistant professor of animal breeding and genetics at Iowa State University and Sanglard’s academic advisor.
To date, Sanglard had published 17 manuscripts and 44 abstracts.
“Leticia is a very hard-working graduate student that takes her research projects to another level. She is also a leader in the Serão Lab and serves as the president of the Animal Breeding & Genetics Student Organization at Iowa State University,” Serão adds.
Her outstanding performance as a graduate student has earned many honors, including the ISU Research Excellence Award, ISU Graduate College Scholarship and the Iowa Pork Producer Association Graduate Student Fellowship.
“More importantly than all of these accomplishments is her personality,” Serão says. “She is warm, honest, dedicated, curious, loyal, funny and is always thinking outside the box. The swine industry will be very well served with her.”
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Iowa State Animal Science Researcher Honored for Genetic Discoveries
