Porcine artificial insemination is a means to stimulate improvement in pig breeding, increase fertility, decrease breeding costs and manpower, and prevent spread of diseases.

□Singificantly Increased Accuracies, □Plentiful Animal Data , □Strong IP Position

l  Technology Platform

The core technology of Chung-Ang University is to provide a method of predicting pig litter size by evaluating semen and a method of predicting pig litter size using an in vitro sperm penetration assay (SPA). This is a novel method of predicting in vivo fertilization using SPA in vitro after optimizing each step of the procedure. Thus, it can more accurately predict individuals for producing smaller or larger litters.

 

l  Background and unmet needs

Porcine artificial insemination is a means to stimulate improvement in pig breeding, increase fertility, decrease breeding costs and manpower, and prevent spread of diseases. Thus, the rate of its application has increased about three times over the last 15 years. However, artificial insemination lacks productivity compared to its high application rate, and the results of its application to breeding widely vary. That is, while the rate of its application has increased, artificial insemination has not been used effectively to improve pig breeding.

Due to poor quality of semen commercially provided by the artificial insemination center, which focuses just on quantitative improvement of artificial insegmentation, pig breeders are increasinngly turning back to natural insemination. The isolation and provision of high-quality semen is crucial to efficient application of artificial insemination

 

l  Discovery and Achievements

The data obtained from the SPA were expressed as a sperm fertility index (SFI).

SFI = {the mean number of penetrated sperm per ovum (the number of enlarged sperm heads + the number of decondensed sperm heads) +( the number of pronuclei per ovum x 2)} / the number of ova

Fig. 1a shows a relationship of SPA to historic litter rates. A significant correlation (r = 0.726, p

Early Stage

TABLE. List of Patents for the method of predicting pig litter size

Country	Appln. No.	Status	Description
Korea	10-2008-0031755	Pending	NOVEL METHOD OF PREDICTING PIG LITTER SIZE BY EVALUATING SEMEN
USA	12/234,419	Pending	NOVEL METHOD OF PREDICTING PIG LITTER SIZE BY EVALUATING SEMEN

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