OMICs approaches and technologies for understanding low-high feed efficiency traits in chicken: implication to breeding

Abstract

In poultry production, there has been a trend of continuous increase in cost of feed ingredients which represents the major proportion of the production costs. Feed costs can be reduced by improving feed efficiency traits which increase the possibility of using various indigestible feed sources and decrease the environmental impact of the enhanced poultry production. Therefore, feed efficiency has been used as one of the most important economic traits of selection in the breeding program of chickens. Recently, many OMICs experimental studies have been designed to characterize biological differences between the high and low feed efficiency chicken phenotypes. Biological complexity cannot be fully captured by main individual OMICs such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics. Therefore, researchers have combined multiple assays from the same set of samples to create multi-OMICs datasets. OMICs findings are crucial in improving existing approaches to poultry breeding. The current review aimed to highlight the components of feed efficiency and general OMICs approaches and technologies. Besides, individual and multi-OMICs based understanding of chicken feed efficiency traits and the application of the acquired knowledge in the chicken breeding program were addressed.

Keywords:

• Breeding
• chicken
• feed efficiency
• genomics
• KEGG
• RNA-seq

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Adama Science and Technology University, School of Applied Natural Sciences, Department of Applied Biology, and Haramaya University, College of Natural and Computational Science, School of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology for providing the opportunity of doing this review.

Author contributions

OE collected the published data and drafted the manuscript. AW contributed to revisiting and reviewing the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing does not apply to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.