Researchers from the Genetics and Languages and Computer Systems areas from the Pablo de Olavide University, Seville, have signed a collaboration agreement with the international pig production consultancy PigCHAMP Pro Europa for the comparative study of different movement patterns as predictors of the health status of pigs.
The work to be carried out by researchers is the transformation, through algorithms commonly used in bioinformatics, of the data taken throughout the day obtained by accelerometers that have been implanted in animals in order to generate graphs that represent the pigs movement. As the experts report, “in this way graphs are obtained for each animal, allowing a comparative study of the motor behavior of different individuals throughout the day and its relationship with animal health and welfare”.
The research team led by Antonio J. Pérez Pulido and formed by the scientists Carlos D. Barranco González, Domingo S. Rodríguez Baena and Norberto Díaz Díaz, is an expert in various methods of massive analysis of biological data stored in numerical matrices and to the field of integrating bioinformatics tools for the construction of workflows.
The experience is related to the design and development of algorithms for integrating tools and data that facilitate the analysis of genomes or other biological data. However, the characteristics of the data provided by the PigCHAMP company make them feasible to be analyzed by techniques similar to those used in the field of omics data analysis.
PigCHAMP Pro Europa S.L. is an international consultancy whose origins date back to the year 2000. Its activity is aimed at consulting in applied research and information management in animal production, mainly for pigs, and its mission is to transform the data generated by the activity of the sector into useful information, capable of generating the necessary knowledge to improve decision-making.
The company has learned about the investigative work of the Olavide group of scientists through the Applied Research Catalog, UPOtec, http://www.upo.es/upotec/. This on-line catalog of scientific and technological resources developed at Olavide is managed by its Research Results Transfer Office (OTRI), and its objective is to publicize the services offered by the scientific community to the productive sectors of society. .