In the present study, microsatellite markers were used to
genotype chicken samples and genome-scan analysis was
conducted to map QTLs for body weight traits of KNC.
Mapping of QTLs using microsatellite markers has been
successfully used to determine genetic contributions to
economically important traits in chickens by examining the
relationship between variations of microsatellite allelic and
growth-related traits (Schreiweis et al., 2005; Tercic et al.,
2009). Mapping of QTL regions will not be clearly valuable
without screening and tracing the positional candidate genes
in those QTL regions. For this reason, QTL studies are
always followed by detection of mutations in the functional
regions within QTL regions. Uemoto et al. (2010) identified
a positional candidate gene (the ornithine decarboxylase
gene) for growth and carcass weight (CW) in F2 intercross
chickens based on a previously determined QTL region on
chicken chromosome 3 (GGA3). The retinoblastoma 1 gene
in the QTL region for body and CW is also a potential
positional candidate gene for body weight (Zhang et al.,
2011).