Development of a 64 SNV panel for breed authentication in Iberian pigs and their derived meat products

Spanish legislation regulates the labelling of Iberian pig meat and dry-cured products, which are labelled as "Ibérico" or "100% Ibérico" when they come from Duroc x Iberian crossbred or Iberian purebred pigs. Although the analytical authentication of breed origin is not mandatory, a genetic diagnostic tool is demanded by producers and consumers. We have designed a 64 Single Nucleotide Variant genotyping panel displaying extreme allelic frequencies between Duroc and Iberian purebred samples. Average proportions of Iberian alleles of 0.99, 0.01, 0.77 and 0.48 were estimated by admixture clustering analysis of known origin samples, for Iberian and Duroc purebred, 75% Iberian and 50% Iberian classes, respectively. A supervised analysis with 1419 samples showed some overlapping between contiguous classes, but the calculated degrees of separability ranged from 0.800 to 0.996, exceeding the threshold value (0.70) for considering suitable for prediction. Therefore, this panel is a useful genetic tool to infer purebred or crossbred Iberian origin of live animals, meat and dry-cured products.