Analysis of the biophysical qualities of eggs in the pushkinsk and tzarskosel’skaya hens with various allelic variants of the LCORL gene

The aim of the study was to analyse the association of polymorphic variants of the LCORL gene for SNP A503G with egg quality in chickens of the Pushkin and Tsarskoye Selo breeds. The sample consisted of chickens of the combined productivity direction of the Pushkin (n=107) and Tsarskoye Selo (n=90) breeds of 2021 year of hatching. The birds were kept in individual cages on the basis of the bioresource collection of the RRIFAGB “Genetic Collection of Rare Endangered Breeds of Chickens” (Pushkin, St. Petersburg). The poultry were genotyped by PCR-RFLP. Biophysical properties of the eggs were evaluated in hens at 35 weeks of age. A comparative analysis of the qualitative characteristics of the eggs revealed some differences between the breeds. For examle, the eggs from the Pushkin breed hens differed from the eggs of the Tsarskoye Selo hens in high egg weight (p ≤ 0.001) and shell (p ≤ 0.01), shell thickness (p ≤ 0.01), PPF values (p ≤ 0.01), but had a thinner shell membrane (p ≤ 0.01). The analysis of the SNP A503G association with the LCORL gene showed that the eggs from the Pushkin chickens with the AG genotype had high mean values for shell thickness (p < 0.001), shell weight (p < 0.05) and yolk weight (p < 0.01). For chickens of the Tsarskoye Selo breed, significant associations were obtained for chickens with the AG genotype on the basis of yolk weight (p ˂ 0.05).

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