PSVII-27 Early plasma androstenone concentrations may indicate extent of boar taint at slaughter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Castration is a highly invasive procedure performed on male pigs within the first few days after birth. Castration reduces aggressive and sexual behaviours and, more importantly, eliminates the incidence of a meat quality issue called boar taint. Androstenone, one of the boar taint causing compounds, is a steroid hormone produced during puberty in boars, and also during a spike of testicular steroidogenesis at 21 days of age. This peak is thought to mature the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis; however, 21-day steroid concentrations have not previously been linked to the extent of boar taint development at slaughter. The objective of this research is to determine if androstenone concentrations at 21 days of age can predict boar taint development at slaughter. Crossbred [(YorkshireXLandrace)XDuroc] boars (n = 36) were raised in pens of two females and two males to average market slaughter weight. Blood was taken at 21 days and slaughter, backfat was collected at slaughter. Plasma and fat androstenone concentrations were measured by androstenone-specific ELISA. Data was analyzed using Pearson correlation and ANOVA. Boars >120kg at slaughter showed positive correlation (R=0.54, P =.007) between 21-day plasma androstenone and fat androstenone concentrations at slaughter, and tended to correlate (R=0.40, P =.056) between 21-day plasma androstenone and plasma androstenone concentrations at slaughter. Boars yet to reach 120kg by slaughter did not show correlation (R=0.2, P = .2) between 21-day plasma androstenone and slaughter androstenone concentrations. There was no correlation between age and weight at slaughter, and plasma and fat androstenone concentrations were not different (P >.05) between groups above and below 120kg at slaughter. These results suggest that 21-day plasma androstenone concentrations may be indicative of androstenone accumulation in the fat and plasma if pigs are over 120kg at slaughter. This can aid with identifying boars at risk of developing boar taint early so that solutions such as immunocastration can be implemented.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".