Investigating the role of genetics in breast meat quality and white striping in Canadian turkeys
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The prevalence of meat quality defects, such as pale, soft, exudative (PSE) meat, and muscle myopathies, such as white striping (WS), have been of increasing interest to the poultry industry over the past few decades. The rise in prevalence of quality defects and myopathies are thought to be closely associated with the drastic changes in growth rate due to improvements in management, nutrition, and genetic selection. Research surrounding these traits in turkeys is limited, therefore, the objectives of this thesis were to provide a better understanding of the role genetics plays in breast meat quality and WS in Canadian turkeys and outline the relationships among these traits and other economically important traits such as body weight and feed efficiency. We first tested the reliability of a four-category severity scoring system for WS adapted from broiler chickens. After this system was found to be reliable within and between observers, it was used to score a large population of turkey toms for WS. In study 2, genetic parameters of breast meat colour, pH, and WS were estimated. These traits were estimated to be moderately heritable and various unfavorable correlations between these traits and economically important traits were reported. Finally, given the moderate heritability of WS estimated in the second study, the genomic architecture of WS was further investigated by means of a genome-wide association study (GWAS) followed by functional analysis. The findings of this study supported that of previously published work in broiler chickens which suggests that the biological limits of the circulatory system have been reached resulting in ischemic conditions in the muscles and development of WS. Although continued research is needed to further understand the various aspects that influence turkey meat quality and the presence of myopathies, this thesis adds to the body of knowledge surrounding the genetic factors affecting these traits in turkeys.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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".