Four genetic loci affecting swine lung lesions identified by whole-genome sequencing-based association studies

Dear Editor, Lung disease is a serious concern in humans and domestic animals.Huge economic losses are caused by enzootic pneumonia in the swine industry worldwide (Maes et al.,2018).The lung can be easily invaded by environmental pathogens,resulting in lung diseases usually accompanied by lung lesions.Environmental and genetic factors jointly affect the initiation and development of lung diseases,and there have been many genetic studies of lung diseases in humans(Hansel et al.,2013;Hobbs et al.,2017) and domestic ani-mals (Huang et al.,2017;McRae et al.,2018).However,in humans,it is difficult to assess lung lesions directly.The genetic basis of lung diseases is normally investigated by lung function testing as an indirect disease indicator (Hansel et al.,2013;Hobbs et al.,2017).In this sense,the pig can serve as an excellent human biomedical model due to its similarity to human in anatomy,physiology,and genetics.It is convenient to gain direct and accurate phenotype of lung lesions after harvesting the pigs,which is helpful in deci-phering the genetic architecture of lung diseases.