The Experts below are selected from a list of 360 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Marijke Aluwé - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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on farm intervention studies on reduction of boar Taint prevalence feeding strategies presence of gilts and time in lairage
Research in Veterinary Science, 2018Co-Authors: Evert Heyrman, Sam Millet, Frank Tuyttens, Lynn Vanhaecke, Bart Ampe, Steven Janssens, Nadine Buys, Jella Wauters, Marijke AluwéAbstract:Abstract One of the challenges in the production of entire male pigs is the occurrence of boar Taint. We separately tested the effect of 3 management strategies to reduce boar Taint on respectively 2, 3, and 6 Flemish pig farms: 1) adapted feeding strategies, 2) presence of gilts in the compartment, and 3) varying lairage duration at the slaughterhouse. A commercialized feed concept resulted in a significant reduction of olfactory boar Taint prevalence when fed for 2 weeks (T2W) compared to control (T-CON) (P = 0.030). For T2W and when fed for 3 weeks (T3W), androstenone (AND) (P = 0.002 for T2W, P = 0.029 for T3W) and skatole (SKA) (P 3 h did not significantly affect boar Taint.
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sensory evaluation of boar Taint containing minced meat dry cured ham and dry fermented sausage by a trained expert panel and consumers
Food Chemistry, 2017Co-Authors: Kaat Verplanken, Marijke Aluwé, Jella Wauters, Vicky Vercruysse, Lynn VanhaeckeAbstract:Abstract One of the main issues related to entire male pigs is the occurrence of boar Taint, an off-odour, which compromises meat consumability. In this study, odour thresholds (indole: 24–65 µg kg−1, skatole: 44–89 µg kg−1, androstenone: 121–342 µg kg−1) for the boar Taint compounds were estimated in minced meat, dry fermented sausage and dry-cured ham. Afterwards, sensory evaluation of these products containing 10% Tainted meat (minced meat and dry fermented sausage) or moderate boar Taint compound levels (dry-cured ham) occurred. The beneficial effect of diluting Tainted meat was demonstrated, as no significant difference in consumability was observed between gilts and 10% Tainted meat by experts as well as consumers. Also dry-curing proved a promising technique for masking boar Taint and preventing consumer dissatisfaction. The obtained results demonstrate the applicability of the estimated thresholds in meat as a tool for identifying masking and reducing strategies on the perception of boar Taint.
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olfactory evaluation of boar Taint effect of factors measured at slaughter and link with boar Taint compounds
Animal, 2017Co-Authors: Evert Heyrman, Sam Millet, Frank Tuyttens, Lynn Vanhaecke, Bart Ampe, Steven Janssens, Nadine Buys, Jella Wauters, Marijke AluwéAbstract:There is a commitment by the European pig sector to ban surgical castration of male piglets in the European Union in 2018. One alternative to castration is to raise entire male pigs, with an increased risk of boar Taint. A field study was performed to: (1) evaluate inter- and intra-farm variation in boar Taint prevalence, (2) investigate factors measured at slaughter influencing boar Taint and (3) evaluate the relationship between sensorial scoring by a trained panel and the concentration of boar Taint components. From 34 farms, neck fat samples were collected from all entire male pigs in at least two slaughter batches per farm (78 batches; 9167 animals). In addition to olfactory boar Taint analysis, data were also collected on fresh skin lesions (score 0 to 3) at the slaughter line, slaughter weight, lean meat percentage, duration of transport, time spent in lairage, total delivery duration, day length, shortening of days and outdoor mean temperature. Using the hot iron method, neck fat samples were scored (eight-point scale) for boar Taint. Average boar Taint prevalence (score 3) was 5.6 +/- 2.5% and the mean difference between the maximum and minimum prevalence per farm was 4.3 +/- 3.2%. Androstenone (AND), skatole (SKA) and indole concentrations were measured for a subset (n=254) of the samples. According to binomial univariate mixed models, entire male pigs with a higher skin lesion score had higher odds of having boar Taint (P=0.031), as did fatter entire male pigs (P<0.001). In the binomial multivariate mixed model lean meat percentage (P<0.001) and outdoor mean temperature (P=0.005) remained as only significant factors. Based on our results, we can conclude that these statistically significant at least partially influence the prevalence of boar Taint. According to the binomial univariate mixed models SKA concentration in liquid fat seems a better predictor for boar Taint than AND. There were no significant synergetic effects between boar Taint compounds.
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The effect of the MC4R gene on boar Taint compounds, sexual maturity and behaviour in growing-finishing boars and gilts
Animal : an international journal of animal bioscience, 2015Co-Authors: A. Van Den Broeke, Marijke Aluwé, Sam Millet, Lynn Vanhaecke, Steven Janssens, Nadine Buys, Jella Wauters, Frank TuyttensAbstract:Societal pressure to ban surgical castration of male piglets is rising due to animal welfare concerns, thus other methods to prevent boar Taint need to be explored. Genetic selection against boar Taint appears to be a long-term sustainable alternative. However, as boar Taint is linked to reproductive hormones, it is important to consider possible negative side effects such as delayed sexual maturity or changes in behaviour. We reported earlier that the melanocortin-4 receptor (MC4R) marker can be used to reduce boar Taint levels in fat of boars. The objective of this study was to evaluate whether MC4R marker-assisted selection for lower boar Taint prevalence affects plasma levels of boar Taint compounds and testosterone; sexual maturity; behaviour; skin lesions; and lameness in boars and gilts. Using an intervention study with a 2 x 2 design, 264 boars and gilts differing on position 893 of the MC4R gene (AA v. GG) were compared. The MC4R polymorphism did not affect the plasma concentration of either androstenone or testosterone at different time points, whereas the concentration of skatole was significantly lower (P = 0.003) and the concentration of indole tended to be lower (P = 0.074) in GG compared with AA boars. A higher percentage of gilts of the GG genotype were in puberty at slaughter age compared with AA gilts (P < 0.001). The age of the boars at sexual maturity (as indicated by the first positive preputial smear test) did not differ between AA and GG boars. In contrast, weight of GG boars at sexual maturity tended to be lower (P = 0.065). During the period from 6 weeks of age to slaughter, boars and gilts of the GG genotype showed more playing behaviour (P = 0.015) and less passive and feeding behaviour (P = 0.003). They showed more skin lesions on their back and caudal area (P = 0.022), and tended to show more skin lesions on their head and anterior area (P = 0.093) compared with AA animals. In conclusion, the polymorphism in the MC4R gene can be used as a marker without negative effects on reproduction characteristics in boars and gilts. Genetic selection towards a lower prevalence of boar Taint will lead to more active pigs with more skin lesions. Management strategies may therefore be necessary to reduce skin lesions in the selected animals.
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absence of an effect of dietary fibre or clinoptilolite on boar Taint in entire male pigs fed practical diets
Meat Science, 2009Co-Authors: Marijke Aluwé, Frank Tuyttens, G. Nijs, Sam Mille, K Verheyde, H F De Brabande, D L De Brabande, M. J. Van OeckelAbstract:Abstract This study aimed to evaluate the possibility of reducing boar Taint in boars (Pietrain × Hybrid) by addition of different feed ingredients (raw potato starch (RPS) 10%, raw potato starch 10% + wheat bran 5% (RPS + WB), lupins 10%, inulin 5%, clinoptilolite 1%) to a standard diet over a period of 4–6 weeks before slaughter. Control boars (CBOAR) as well as barrows were fed the standard diet. Efficacy of the different feed ingredients was evaluated by different boar Taint detection methods: hot iron method, consumer panel, expert panel and laboratory analysis. According to all detection methods, clear differences were noticeable between boars and barrows. No differences in boar Taint incidence were found between the boars on the different dietary treatments as assessed by consumers, experts, hot iron method or the concentration of skatole in fat. A significant effect on indole level was found, but no further differentiation could be made. The concentration of backfat androstenone was significantly higher for the inulin and control boar group compared to the lupin group. In conclusion, none of the feeding strategies tested in this study reduced boar Taint in boars at the given percentages.
Peng Liu - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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straightTaint decoupled offline symbolic Taint analysis
Automated Software Engineering, 2016Co-Authors: Jiang Ming, Gaoyao Xiao, Jun Wang, Peng LiuAbstract:Taint analysis has been widely applied in ex post facto security applications, such as attack provenance investigation, computer forensic analysis, and reverse engineering. Unfortunately, the high runtime overhead imposed by dynamic Taint analysis makes it impractical in many scenarios. The key obstacle is the strict coupling of program execution and Taint tracking logic code. To alleviate this performance bottleneck, recent work seeks to offload Taint analysis from program execution and run it on a spare core or a different CPU. However, since the Taint analysis has heavy data and control dependencies on the program execution, the massive data in recording and transformation overshadow the benefit of decoupling. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to allow very lightweight logging, resulting in much lower execution slowdown, while still permitting us to perform full-featured offline Taint analysis. We develop StraightTaint, a hybrid Taint analysis tool that completely decouples the program execution and Taint analysis. StraightTaint relies on very lightweight logging of the execution information to reconstruct a straight-line code, enabling an offline symbolic Taint analysis without frequent data communication with the application. While StraightTaint does not log complete runtime or input values, it is able to precisely identify the causal relationships between sources and sinks, for example. Compared with traditional dynamic Taint analysis tools, StraightTaint has much lower application runtime overhead.
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Taintpipe pipelined symbolic Taint analysis
USENIX Security Symposium, 2015Co-Authors: Jiang Ming, Gaoyao Xiao, Jun Wang, Peng LiuAbstract:Taint analysis has a wide variety of compelling applications in security tasks, from software attack detection to data lifetime analysis. Static Taint analysis propagates Taint values following all possible paths with no need for concrete execution, but is generally less accurate than dynamic analysis. Unfortunately, the high performance penalty incurred by dynamic Taint analyses makes its deployment impractical in production systems. To ameliorate this performance bottleneck, recent research efforts aim to decouple data flow tracking logic from program execution. We continue this line of research in this paper and propose pipelined symbolic Taint analysis, a novel technique for parallelizing and pipelining Taint analysis to take advantage of ubiquitous multi-core platforms. We have developed a prototype system called TaintPipe. TaintPipe performs very lightweight runtime logging to produce compact control flow profiles, and spawns multiple threads as different stages of a pipeline to carry out symbolic Taint analysis in parallel. Our experiments show that TaintPipe imposes low overhead on application runtime performance and accelerates Taint analysis significantly. Compared to a state-of-the-art inlined dynamic data flow tracking tool, TaintPipe achieves 2.38 times speedup for Taint analysis on SPEC 2006 and 2.43 times for a set of common utilities, respectively. In addition, we demonstrate the strength of TaintPipe such as natural support of multi-tag Taint analysis with several security applications.
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cross layer comprehensive intrusion harm analysis for production workload server systems
Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, 2010Co-Authors: Shengzhi Zhang, Xiaoqi Jia, Peng Liu, Jiwu JingAbstract:Analyzing the (harm of) intrusion to enterprise servers is an onerous and error-prone work. Though dynamic Taint tracking enables automatic fine-grained intrusion harm analysis for enterprise servers, the significant runtime overhead introduced is generally intolerable in the production workload environment. Thus, we propose PEDA (Production Environment Damage Analysis) system, which decouples the onerous analysis work from the online execution of the production servers. Once compromised, the "has-been-infected" execution is analyzed during high fidelity replay on a separate instrumentation platform. The replay is implemented based on the heterogeneous virtual machine migration. The servers' online execution runs atop fast hardware-assisted virtual machines (such as Xen for near native speed), while the infected execution is replayed atop binary instrumentation virtual machines (such as Qemu for the implementation of Taint analysis). From identified intrusion symptoms, PEDA is capable of locating the fine-grained Taint seed by integrating the backward system call dependency tracking and one-step-forward Taint information flow auditing. Started with the fine-grained Taint seed, PEDA applies dynamic Taint analysis during the replayed execution. Evaluation demonstrates the efficiency of PEDA system with runtime overhead as low as 5%. The real-life intrusion studies successfully show the comprehensiveness and the precision of PEDA's intrusion harm analysis.
Wei Zou - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Checksum-Aware Fuzzing Combined with Dynamic Taint Analysis and Symbolic Execution
ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, 2011Co-Authors: Tielei Wang, Guofei Gu, Tao Wei, Wei ZouAbstract:Fuzz testing has proven successful in finding security vulnerabilities in large programs. However, tradi- tional fuzz testing tools have a well-known common drawback: they are ineffective if most generated inputs are rejected at the early stage of programrunning, especially when target programs employ checksummech- anisms to verify the integrity of inputs. This article presents TaintScope, an automatic fuzzing system using dynamic Taint analysis and symbolic execution techniques, to tackle the above problem. TaintScope has sev- eral novel features: (1) TaintScope is a checksum-aware fuzzing tool. It can identify checksum fields in inputs, accurately locate checksum-based integrity checks by using branch profiling techniques, and bypass such checks via control flow alteration. Furthermore, it can fix checksum values in generated inputs using combined concrete and symbolic execution techniques. (2) TaintScope is a Taint-based fuzzing tool working at the x86 binary level. Based on fine-grained dynamic Taint tracing, TaintScope identifies the “hot bytes” in a well-formed input that are used in security-sensitive operations (e.g., invoking system/library calls), and then focuses on modifying such bytes with random or boundary values. (3) TaintScope is also a symbolic- execution-based fuzzing tool. It can symbolically evaluate a trace, reason about all possible values that can execute the trace, and then detect potential vulnerabilities on the trace. We evaluate TaintScope on a number of large real-world applications. Experimental results show that TaintScope can accurately locate the checksum checks in programs and dramatically improve the effective- ness of fuzz testing. TaintScope has already found 30 previously unknown vulnerabilities in several widely used applications, including Adobe Acrobat, Flash Player, Google Picasa, and Microsoft Paint. Most of these severe vulnerabilities have been confirmed by Secunia and oCERT, and assigned CVE identifiers (such as CVE-2009-1882, CVE-2009-2688). Vendor patches have been released or are in preparation based on our reports.
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TaintScope: A checksum-aware directed fuzzing tool for automatic software vulnerability detection
Proceedings - IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2010Co-Authors: Tielei Wang, Guofei Gu, Tao Wei, Wei ZouAbstract:Fuzz testing has proven successful in finding security vulnerabilities in large programs. However, traditional fuzz testing tools have a well-known common drawback: they are ineffective if most generated malformed inputs are rejected in the early stage of program running, especially when target programs employ checksum mechanisms to verify the integrity of inputs. In this paper, we present TaintScope, an automatic fuzzing system using dynamic Taint analysis and symbolic execution techniques, to tackle the above problem. TaintScope has several novel contributions: 1) TaintScope is the first checksum-aware fuzzing tool to the best of our knowledge. It can identify checksum fields in input instances, accurately locate checksum-based integrity checks by using branch profiling techniques, and bypass such checks via control flow alteration. 2) TaintScope is a directed fuzzing tool working at X86 binary level (on both Linux and Window). Based on fine-grained dynamic Taint tracing, TaintScope identifies which bytes in a well-formed input are used in security-sensitive operations (e.g., invoking system/library calls) and then focuses on modifying such bytes. Thus, generated inputs are more likely to trigger potential vulnerabilities. 3) TaintScope is fully automatic, from detecting checksum, directed fuzzing, to repairing crashed samples. It can fix checksum values in generated inputs using combined concrete and symbolic execution techniques. We evaluate TaintScope on a number of large real-world applications. Experimental results show that TaintScope can accurately locate the checksum checks in programs and dramatically improve the effectiveness of fuzz testing. TaintScope has already found 27 previously unknown vulnerabilities in several widely used applications, including Adobe Acrobat, Google Picasa, Microsoft Paint, and ImageMagick. Most of these severe vulnerabilities have been confirmed by Secunia and oCERT, and assigned CVE identifiers (such as CVE-2009-1882, CVE-200-\n-\n9-2688). Corresponding patches from vendors are released or in progress based on our reports.
Lynn Vanhaecke - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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on farm intervention studies on reduction of boar Taint prevalence feeding strategies presence of gilts and time in lairage
Research in Veterinary Science, 2018Co-Authors: Evert Heyrman, Sam Millet, Frank Tuyttens, Lynn Vanhaecke, Bart Ampe, Steven Janssens, Nadine Buys, Jella Wauters, Marijke AluwéAbstract:Abstract One of the challenges in the production of entire male pigs is the occurrence of boar Taint. We separately tested the effect of 3 management strategies to reduce boar Taint on respectively 2, 3, and 6 Flemish pig farms: 1) adapted feeding strategies, 2) presence of gilts in the compartment, and 3) varying lairage duration at the slaughterhouse. A commercialized feed concept resulted in a significant reduction of olfactory boar Taint prevalence when fed for 2 weeks (T2W) compared to control (T-CON) (P = 0.030). For T2W and when fed for 3 weeks (T3W), androstenone (AND) (P = 0.002 for T2W, P = 0.029 for T3W) and skatole (SKA) (P 3 h did not significantly affect boar Taint.
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sensory evaluation of boar Taint containing minced meat dry cured ham and dry fermented sausage by a trained expert panel and consumers
Food Chemistry, 2017Co-Authors: Kaat Verplanken, Marijke Aluwé, Jella Wauters, Vicky Vercruysse, Lynn VanhaeckeAbstract:Abstract One of the main issues related to entire male pigs is the occurrence of boar Taint, an off-odour, which compromises meat consumability. In this study, odour thresholds (indole: 24–65 µg kg−1, skatole: 44–89 µg kg−1, androstenone: 121–342 µg kg−1) for the boar Taint compounds were estimated in minced meat, dry fermented sausage and dry-cured ham. Afterwards, sensory evaluation of these products containing 10% Tainted meat (minced meat and dry fermented sausage) or moderate boar Taint compound levels (dry-cured ham) occurred. The beneficial effect of diluting Tainted meat was demonstrated, as no significant difference in consumability was observed between gilts and 10% Tainted meat by experts as well as consumers. Also dry-curing proved a promising technique for masking boar Taint and preventing consumer dissatisfaction. The obtained results demonstrate the applicability of the estimated thresholds in meat as a tool for identifying masking and reducing strategies on the perception of boar Taint.
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olfactory evaluation of boar Taint effect of factors measured at slaughter and link with boar Taint compounds
Animal, 2017Co-Authors: Evert Heyrman, Sam Millet, Frank Tuyttens, Lynn Vanhaecke, Bart Ampe, Steven Janssens, Nadine Buys, Jella Wauters, Marijke AluwéAbstract:There is a commitment by the European pig sector to ban surgical castration of male piglets in the European Union in 2018. One alternative to castration is to raise entire male pigs, with an increased risk of boar Taint. A field study was performed to: (1) evaluate inter- and intra-farm variation in boar Taint prevalence, (2) investigate factors measured at slaughter influencing boar Taint and (3) evaluate the relationship between sensorial scoring by a trained panel and the concentration of boar Taint components. From 34 farms, neck fat samples were collected from all entire male pigs in at least two slaughter batches per farm (78 batches; 9167 animals). In addition to olfactory boar Taint analysis, data were also collected on fresh skin lesions (score 0 to 3) at the slaughter line, slaughter weight, lean meat percentage, duration of transport, time spent in lairage, total delivery duration, day length, shortening of days and outdoor mean temperature. Using the hot iron method, neck fat samples were scored (eight-point scale) for boar Taint. Average boar Taint prevalence (score 3) was 5.6 +/- 2.5% and the mean difference between the maximum and minimum prevalence per farm was 4.3 +/- 3.2%. Androstenone (AND), skatole (SKA) and indole concentrations were measured for a subset (n=254) of the samples. According to binomial univariate mixed models, entire male pigs with a higher skin lesion score had higher odds of having boar Taint (P=0.031), as did fatter entire male pigs (P<0.001). In the binomial multivariate mixed model lean meat percentage (P<0.001) and outdoor mean temperature (P=0.005) remained as only significant factors. Based on our results, we can conclude that these statistically significant at least partially influence the prevalence of boar Taint. According to the binomial univariate mixed models SKA concentration in liquid fat seems a better predictor for boar Taint than AND. There were no significant synergetic effects between boar Taint compounds.
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The effect of the MC4R gene on boar Taint compounds, sexual maturity and behaviour in growing-finishing boars and gilts
Animal : an international journal of animal bioscience, 2015Co-Authors: A. Van Den Broeke, Marijke Aluwé, Sam Millet, Lynn Vanhaecke, Steven Janssens, Nadine Buys, Jella Wauters, Frank TuyttensAbstract:Societal pressure to ban surgical castration of male piglets is rising due to animal welfare concerns, thus other methods to prevent boar Taint need to be explored. Genetic selection against boar Taint appears to be a long-term sustainable alternative. However, as boar Taint is linked to reproductive hormones, it is important to consider possible negative side effects such as delayed sexual maturity or changes in behaviour. We reported earlier that the melanocortin-4 receptor (MC4R) marker can be used to reduce boar Taint levels in fat of boars. The objective of this study was to evaluate whether MC4R marker-assisted selection for lower boar Taint prevalence affects plasma levels of boar Taint compounds and testosterone; sexual maturity; behaviour; skin lesions; and lameness in boars and gilts. Using an intervention study with a 2 x 2 design, 264 boars and gilts differing on position 893 of the MC4R gene (AA v. GG) were compared. The MC4R polymorphism did not affect the plasma concentration of either androstenone or testosterone at different time points, whereas the concentration of skatole was significantly lower (P = 0.003) and the concentration of indole tended to be lower (P = 0.074) in GG compared with AA boars. A higher percentage of gilts of the GG genotype were in puberty at slaughter age compared with AA gilts (P < 0.001). The age of the boars at sexual maturity (as indicated by the first positive preputial smear test) did not differ between AA and GG boars. In contrast, weight of GG boars at sexual maturity tended to be lower (P = 0.065). During the period from 6 weeks of age to slaughter, boars and gilts of the GG genotype showed more playing behaviour (P = 0.015) and less passive and feeding behaviour (P = 0.003). They showed more skin lesions on their back and caudal area (P = 0.022), and tended to show more skin lesions on their head and anterior area (P = 0.093) compared with AA animals. In conclusion, the polymorphism in the MC4R gene can be used as a marker without negative effects on reproduction characteristics in boars and gilts. Genetic selection towards a lower prevalence of boar Taint will lead to more active pigs with more skin lesions. Management strategies may therefore be necessary to reduce skin lesions in the selected animals.
Aluwé M - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Monitoring of behavior, sex hormones and boar Taint compounds during the vaccination program for immunocastration in three sire lines
'Elsevier BV', 2019Co-Authors: Heyrman E, Millet S, Ampe B, Janssens S, Buys N, Kowalski E, Tuyttens Fam, Wauters J, Vanhaecke L, Aluwé MAbstract:Immunocastration (vaccination against boar Taint) is an alternative method to prevent boar Taint without the need for surgical castration. This study investigates the evolution of boar Taint compounds in serum and fat, serum steroid compounds as well as behavior in immunocastrated pigs from 3 sire lines: 15 stress positive Belgian Piétrain (BP), 20 stress negative French Piétrain (FP), and 20 stress negative Canadian Duroc (CD). Hormone and boar Taint compounds in serum were determined at 4 time points; boar Taint compounds in fat were determined at 3 time points. Behavior, skin lesions, animal and pen fouling were also recorded before the first vaccination (V2). Aggressiveness, eating and drinking and general activity behavior declined from V2 for all sire lines. Pigs from BP were cleaner than FP and CD pigs. Even though immunocastration was effective in general (reduced testosterone, estradiol as well as androstenone in serum) for all sire lines, some individual pigs showed either androstenone or skatole levels in fat above cutoff values. While the immunocastration mechanism works as intended for androstenone, and also for skatole for the three sire lines, the risk of carcasses with boar Taint compounds above cutoff levels (respectively 1.9 and 3.7%) still remains to some extent.status: publishe
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Monitoring of behavior, sex hormones and boar Taint compounds during the vaccination program for immunocastration in three sire lines
'Elsevier BV', 2019Co-Authors: Heyrman E, Millet S, Tuyttens Frank, Janssens S, Buys N, Wauters Jella, Vanhaecke Lynn, Ampe Bart, Kowalski Eline, Aluwé MAbstract:Immunocastration (vaccination against boar Taint) is an alternative method to prevent boar Taint without the need for surgical castration. This study investigates the evolution of boar Taint compounds in serum and fat, serum steroid compounds as well as behavior in immunocastrated pigs from 3 sire lines: 15 stress positive Belgian Pietrain (BP), 20 stress negative French Pietrain (FP), and 20 stress negative Canadian Duroc (CD). Hormone and boar Taint compounds in serum were determined at 4 time points; boar Taint compounds in fat were determined at 3 time points. Behavior, skin lesions, animal and pen fouling were also recorded before the first vaccination ( V2). Aggressiveness, eating and drinking and general activity behavior declined from V2 for all sire lines. Pigs from BP were cleaner than FP and CD pigs. Even though immunocastration was effective in general (reduced testosterone, estradiol as well as androstenone in serum) for all sire lines, some individual pigs showed either androstenone or skatole levels in fat above cutoff values. While the immunocastration mechanism works as intended for androstenone, and also for skatole for the three sire lines, the risk of carcasses with boar Taint compounds above cutoff levels (respectively 1.9 and 3.7%) still remains to some extent
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On farm intervention studies on reduction of boar Taint prevalence: Feeding strategies, presence of gilts and time in lairage
'Elsevier BV', 2018Co-Authors: Heyrman E, Millet S, Ampe B, Janssens S, Buys N, Tuyttens Fam, Wauters J, Vanhaecke L, Aluwé MAbstract:One of the challenges in the production of entire male pigs is the occurrence of boar Taint. We separately tested the effect of 3 management strategies to reduce boar Taint on respectively 2, 3, and 6 Flemish pig farms: 1) adapted feeding strategies, 2) presence of gilts in the compartment, and 3) varying lairage duration at the slaughterhouse. A commercialized feed concept resulted in a significant reduction of olfactory boar Taint prevalence when fed for 2 weeks (T2W) compared to control (T-CON) (P = 0.030). For T2W and when fed for 3 weeks (T3W), androstenone (AND) (P = 0.002 for T2W, P = 0.029 for T3W) and skatole (SKA) (P 3 h did not significantly affect boar Taint.status: publishe
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Olfactory evaluation of boar Taint : effect of factors measured at slaughter and link with boar Taint compounds
'Cambridge University Press (CUP)', 2017Co-Authors: Heyrman E, Millet S, Tuyttens Frank, Ampe B, Janssens S, Buys N, Wauters Jella, Vanhaecke Lynn, Aluwé MAbstract:There is a commitment by the European pig sector to ban surgical castration of male piglets in the European Union in 2018. One alternative to castration is to raise entire male pigs, with an increased risk of boar Taint. A field study was performed to: (1) evaluate inter- and intra-farm variation in boar Taint prevalence, (2) investigate factors measured at slaughter influencing boar Taint and (3) evaluate the relationship between sensorial scoring by a trained panel and the concentration of boar Taint components. From 34 farms, neck fat samples were collected from all entire male pigs in at least two slaughter batches per farm (78 batches; 9167 animals). In addition to olfactory boar Taint analysis, data were also collected on fresh skin lesions (score 0 to 3) at the slaughter line, slaughter weight, lean meat percentage, duration of transport, time spent in lairage, total delivery duration, day length, shortening of days and outdoor mean temperature. Using the hot iron method, neck fat samples were scored (eight-point scale) for boar Taint. Average boar Taint prevalence (score 3) was 5.6 +/- 2.5% and the mean difference between the maximum and minimum prevalence per farm was 4.3 +/- 3.2%. Androstenone (AND), skatole (SKA) and indole concentrations were measured for a subset (n=254) of the samples. According to binomial univariate mixed models, entire male pigs with a higher skin lesion score had higher odds of having boar Taint (P=0.031), as did fatter entire male pigs (P
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The MC4R c.893G > A mutation: A marker for growth and leanness associated with boar Taint odour in Belgian pig breeds
'Elsevier BV', 2015Co-Authors: Schroyen Martine, Aluwé M, Janssens Steven, Vanhaecke L, Stinckens Anneleen, Brebels M, Bertolini F, Lamberigts Chris, Bekaert K, Tuyttens FamAbstract:Since surgical castration of male piglets without anaesthesia is under heavy societal pressure, finding a sustainable solution to reduce boar Taint has become urgent. One way to circumvent this animal welfare violation is raising entire male pigs whilst selecting against the Tainted phenotype through marker-assisted selection. Since slaughtering at a lower weight is often suggested to reduce boar Taint, selection using a marker for that trait could be a promising strategy. Therefore, in this study a melanocortin 4 receptor (MC4R) mutation, frequently described in different pig breeds as marker for fat content, weight gain and feed intake, was examined in relation to boar Taint in pig breeds used in Belgian pig farms. Although results suggest an association between this mutation and a boar Taint odour score assigned by experts, no association was found between the mutation and the concentration of the individual chemical boar Taint components androstenone, skatole and indole.publisher: Elsevier articletitle: The MC4R c.893G>A mutation: A marker for growth and leanness associated with boar Taint odour in Belgian pig breeds journaltitle: Meat Science articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.meatsci.2014.08.009 content_type: article copyright: Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.status: publishe