Porcine uncoupling protein-3 gene was used to study its effect on carcass and meat quality traits. The UCP3 partial translated regions in skeletal muscle from four pig breeds were sequenced and the comparison of the fragment sequences among four pig breeds showed that there were three coding-region single nucleotide polymorphisms (cSNP), of which the mutation at 842 bp of the open reading frame can result in the amino acid chang between methionine and threonine, so we selected the mutation as polymorphic site. The detection of polymorphic fragment by the technique of single strand conformation polymorphism (SSCP) and chi2 analysis among three pig breeds indicated that the distribution of three genotypes(AA, AB and BB) was significantly different between Meishan and Large White or Meishan and Landrace( P < 0.01). In addition, association analysis of UCP3 polymorphism with carcass and meat quality traits was conducted in the F2 generation from the Large White x Meishan resource family, the results with GLM analysis showed that UCP3 polymorphism has significant effect on several carcass and meat quality traits and also additive effect on some carcass and meat quality traits predominated in the resource family. It implied that UCP3 gene could be a candidate gene locus or a linked marker to a major gene, which affects the porcine carcass traits and meat quality traits significantly.