Ting Xiong

To study the genetic diversity of Chinese indigenous pig breeds, a total of 403 pigs from 10 local populations and 1 exotic Duroc breed were genotyped for 20 microsatellite markers. Heterozygosity and Wright's F-statistics (F(IS), F(ST), and F(IT)) were calculated to determine the genetic variation in those populations. The observed heterozygosities were in the range of 0.31 (Duroc) to 0.66 (Shengxian). The F(IS) value was in a range of -0.07 to 0.48. The mean F(ST) showed that approximately 78% of the genetic variation was within-population and 22% was across the populations. The 10 Chinese local breeds were classified into two major groups according to the phylogenetic tree, which was based on standard genetic distance. Four pig populations, Jianli, Ganxi Two Ends Black, Shaziling, and Dongshan were grouped into one branch. Before the study, these four populations were all classified as Central China Two Ends Black according to coat color, shape of the head, and shape of the ear. The Jinhua pig, which also has the two-ends-black coat color, was also grouped to the same branch but was not traditionally classified into this type. The five populations were located in various provinces in central China. The other five populations, Nanyang Black, Hainan Spotted, Huainan Black, Jiaxing Black, and Shengxian Spotted (black body, white feet), were grouped into another branch. The two groups of pig breeds had the same F(ST) value (0.14) when calculated separately. This value was similar to that of Iberian pigs (0.13) but smaller than that of the European pigs (0.27) as reported by other researchers. Our study showed that large genetic differentiation exists in Chinese pig breeds. The grouping of the five two-ends-black populations into one branch of the phylogenetic tree may indicate that the number of conservation farms can be decreased for this type of pig.

In order to improve iron chelating ability and retain the activity of functional peptide, corn peptide was chelated with iron to form corn ACE inhibitory peptide-ferrous chelate (CP-Fe) treated by dual-frequency ultrasound. Furthermore, the chelating mechanism was revealed by analyzing various structural changes, and the stability was further evaluated. Under this study condition, the iron-binding capacity of corn ACE inhibitory peptide (CP) and chelate yield reached 66.39% and 82.87%, respectively. Ultrasound-treated CP exhibited a high iron chelating ability, meanwhile, chelation reaction had no significant effect on the ACE inhibition activity (82.21%) of the peptide. CP-Fe was formed by binding the peptides amino, carbonyl and carboxyl groups with Fe2+ demonstrated by Ultra-violet spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared characterization, X-ray diffraction, energy dispersion spectrum, zeta potential, amino acid composition and other multi-angle analyses. Moreover, ultrasound-treated CP-Fe chelate exhibited porous surface and uniform nanoparticle shape. Furthermore, ultrasound-treated CP-Fe chelate exhibited an excellent stability towards various pH (retention rate ≥ 95.47% at pH 6–10), temperatures (retention rate ≥ 85.10% at 25–70 °C), and gastrointestinal digestion (retention rate 79.18%). Overall, ultrasound-treated CP-Fe chelate possessed high iron-chelating ability, ACE inhibition activity and stability. This study provides a novel synthesis method of the iron-chelating corn ACE inhibitory peptide, which is promising to be applied as iron supplements with high efficiency, bioactivity, and stability.

In order to identify differentially expressed mRNAs (which represent possible candidates for significant phenotypic variances of muscle growth, meat quality between introduced European and Chinese indigenous pigs) in the longissimus dorsi muscle tissue between adult Duroc and Erhualian pigs, mRNA differential display was performed. Five 3' anchor primers in combination with 20 different 5' arbitrary primers (100 primer sets) were used and nearly 5,000 cDNA bands were examined, among which 10 differential display cDNAs were obtained, cloned and sequenced. Six of the 10 cDNAs showed similarity to identified genes from GenBank and the other 4 had no matches in GenBank. Differential expression was tested by Northern blot hybridization and could be confirmed for 2 cDNAs. The method used in this study provides a useful molecular tool to investigate genetic variation that occurs at the transcriptional level between different breeds.