As home to nearly 10 million pigs, and some eight million humans, North Carolina produces more pork than any state except Iowa.

This is why North Carolina wants to be involved in an international collaboration to sequence the complete pig genome, a $30 million project expected to benefit agricultural and medical research.

Even though none of the actual lab work or sequence analysis will be conducted in state, the University and the North Carolina Pork Council committed $50,000 and $100,000, respectively, to the pig genome project.

“We are not contributing any data,” Joe Cassady, professor of animal science, said. “But as the number two pork producing state in the nation, we wanted to be involved. There will be an opportunity to benefit from the pig sequence once it’s released.”

As a member of the steering committee of the International Swine Genome Sequencing Consortium, Cassady helped secure a $1.2 to $1.3 million commitment from U.S. universities and pork producers, which, in turn, helped convince the United States Department of Agriculture to contribute an additional $10 million to the project.

Together, these sources account for more than one third of the total genome price tag and are enough to get the work off the ground. International collaborators are expected to contribute the remaining cost, Cassady said.

University scientists involved with pig research are eager to get their hands on the finished sequence.

“The most important thing is that it will allow us to leverage the human genome,” Cassady said. “Quite a few genes in humans have yet to be located in pigs. If we have pig sequence, we can identify genes in pigs that are already known in humans.”

Pig and human genomes are about 95 percent similar in sequence, so known human genes can be used as a guide to identify pig genes. Nonetheless, knowing the actual arrangement of the pig’s own genome will also be a boon to researchers like Melissa Ashwell, professor of animal science. She is looking for pig genes that affect litter size, growth rate and leanness.

“Right now, when we find a region of interest [in pigs], we have to compare its sequence to the mouse or human genome,” she said. “But the pig, human and mouse genomes are organized differently, and pigs may have some genes that humans and mice don’t have.”

Identifying genes that affect traits that can only be measured after slaughter, such as meat pH or marbling, will also help streamline breeding programs, Cassady said.

While agricultural research will use the human genome to better understand pigs, medical research is working in the opposite direction, using pig genomics to advance human medicine.

Jorge Piedrahita, professor in the center for comparative medicine and translational research and the department of molecular and biomedical science, uses pigs as a medical model.

“Pig is the best model for human disease,” Piedrahita said. “Whether we like it or not, we are a lot like them. We have similar body size, similar physiology and we eat the same things.”

Most labs use mice as medical models, but “mice have turned out to be very disappointing little creatures,” Piedrahita said. Mice may be easy to work with, but therapies and drugs that cure mouse disease rarely translate to humans.

Although pig is a better model for human disease, it is limited in usefulness by the lack of a fully sequenced genome. Piedrahita looks forward to the day the pig genome will allow him to better utilize pig as a medical model, using technology that is already available in humans.