Cleft palate associated with an unbalanced karyotype in piglets sired by a heterozygous carrier boar with a balanced constitutional reciprocal translocation.

The progeny of a commercial (Landrace x Duroc) x Large White boar contained a number of piglets with cleft palates. Chromosomal analyses of five affected piglets showed that they all had an identical unbalanced karyotype with partial monosomy of chromosome 16 and partial trisomy of chromosome 3, whereas the normal piglets in the litters had balanced karyotypes. The chromosomal imbalance was the direct result of a constitutional balanced reciprocal translocation carried by their heterozygote sire, described, according to the standard nomenclature, as t(3;16)(q23;q22).