Meat and seafood products are highly perishable foodstuffs, the preservation of which is crucial. Indeed, a bad preservation of these products may lead to important hygienic and safety risks as well as considerable economic loss, a situation that is particularly true for novel products. The utilisation of protective cultures in order to limit these risks is proposed since several years but is still not in common use, partially because a lack of knowledge of microbial ecosystems of these products. The partners of the French network FLOREPRO decided to share their know-how and scientific knowledge on one hand, and their various expertise about food on the other hand, in order to increase the knowledge of meat and seafood products and on the impact of protective cultures on these ecosystems and on the quality of the products. Our aim is thus to provide a sound scientific based information on the benefit that the utilisation of protective cultures may represent in the production of meat/fish foodstuffs. The project is divided into three tasks: - an as exhaustive as possible characterisation of the ecosystem of height selected products (meat and seafood) by the up to date most performing method, 16S rDNA pyrosequencing of the bacterial DNA present on these products, at the time of production and after the use by date. This task also encompasses the selection of putative spoiler micro-organisms from those products; - set up and sharing of model matrices and sensory analysis in order to reproduce spoilage and to prove the spoiling properties of the strains selected from the first task; - evaluation of the impact of already available protective cultures on spoilage, sensorial quality, and global ecosystem of the products we propose to study. The partners of this project are academics, agro institutes and one SME which was a pioneer in the commercialisation of protective cultures. Other industries, SMEs with no financial support, joined the project to furnish the foodstuffs to be analysed. Know-how, expertise and missions of the partners are complementary and about meat/fish products. The foodstuffs we selected are representative of a large panel of origins (beef, veal, poultry, fish, shellfish) and processes (ground, diced cubes, fillets, peeled) and concern novel products for which knowledge about their ecosystem and sanitary quality is scarce.

The most important congenital genetic defects that occur in piglets are hernias (umbilical hernia and inguinal or scrotal hernias), cryptorchidism and splay legs, and to a lesser extent intersexuality, hermaphrodism and anal atresia. They affect on average 3% of the commercial pig populations worldwide. It is important to stress out that, besides the direct economic loss, these defects have a serious impact on animal welfare and health. Some of the defects cause direct piglet mortality, while others lead to culling of piglets showing the disorder. For most of these defects there are strong indications for a genetic component. In SwAn project, we propose to focus on the identification of genes underlying congenital / hereditary disorders in pigs. We propose (1) to enrich the collection of affected samples, (2) to use genome-wide association studies (GWA) with a SNP panel comprising 60 000 markers covering the entire genome at a density which is appropriate for population-based association studies, (3) to identify some of the causal mutations and genes of these congenital diseases and (4) to propose effective marker assisted selection (MAS) against genetic defects.

The aim of the project is to give the information necessary to the implementation genomic selection in pyramid schemes which concern : selection of purebred animals to produce crossbred animals; selection in high health environment but production under commercial conditions. Experimental approach will be carried out in pig and in chicken. Resource populations, purebred and crossbred, controlled in different environments, will be created and controlled for a large number of traits. Genotyping will be carried out thanks to high density SNP Chips (64K already available). Different methods of genomic evaluaation will be compared according to their ability to predict accurately the genetic values of the reproducers in these situations (genetic type, environment). Data sets will be also exploit to optimize the breeding schemes. Results will be presented to the breeders' community of concerned species.