The duck (Anas platyrhynchos) is not only a common domesticated fowl but also an excellent model for the genetic dissection of economically important traits. The application of multiomics approaches has provided valuable insights into livestock domestication and phenotype development. The 1000 Ducks X-omics Project was initiated to uncover the genetics and genomics of ducks. In this review, we summarize the strategies and key achievements of this project, highlighting the reference genome assembly, genome evolution analysis, and the identification of genes and causative mutations underlying key economic traits in ducks. Additionally, we discuss future perspectives and challenges in functional genomic studies that could further accelerate molecular breeding in ducks.

A female with obesity is unhealthy for reproduction. This is mainly because females with obesity have increased fatty acid levels in circulation, and these fatty acids are deposited in nonadipose tissues, such as ovaries and uterine. For the female reproductive system, excessive lipid deposition can lead to lipotoxicity and ongoing oxidative stress that affects the entire process from oocyte maturation to embryo development. In this review, we discuss how the obesity pandemic has led to female infertility. We focus on multiple facets of obesity-mediated reproductive dysfunction, including follicular atresia, oocyte maturation, embryo implantation, reproductive aging, and discuss therapeutic interventions that have the potential to normalize reproductive function in obese females, such as targeting mitochondrial lipid metabolism and antioxidant pathways.

This is the first study to apply insertion and deletion (InDel) markers to conduct genome-wide association study (GWAS) and GP for growth traits in spotted sea bass. Our results indicated that InDel-based GWAS could provide a valuable complement to single nucleotide polymorphism-based studies and highlighted the potential of InDel markers to improve genomic predictive accuracy and efficiency.

Milk fatty acids benefit human health and are directly related to milk quality. However, there is difficulty in collecting data for prediction based on milk mid-infrared spectra. Noisy and redundant wavenumbers in mid-infrared spectra usually lead to low robustness and interpretability of the prediction models, especially in small spectra data. Utilizing mid-infrared spectra with feature selection (i.e., uninformative variable elimination and competitive adaptive reweighted sampling) is more appropriate than simple screening, for example, removing water-related regions and non-selection process. This approach improved the prediction accuracy of milk fatty acids concentration and contributed to the identification of the most relevant wavenumbers of milk fatty acids. These findings offer valuable insight for similar studies on small datasets and are good for phenotyping in breeding.

Improved quality of life has increased the demand for beef. This study shows that circDYRK1A acts as a regulator of bovine muscle development, providing new theoretical material for uncovering the complex regulatory network and molecular mechanisms involved in bovine muscle development.

The integration of multiomics data identified candidate genes influencing drip loss in Beijing Black pigs.