A set of 233 Holstein calves, their 233 dams and 44 sires from 4 large-sized herds was genotyped for 10 microsatellites recommended by ISAG for paternity/parentage testing. Heterozygosity of microsatellites ranged from 0.607 (SPS115) to 0.835 (TGLA227), and PIC from 0.575 (SPS115) to 0.816 (TGLA227) confirming a high polymorphism of each analysed locus. Their combined exclusion probability reac...

Zoo and aquarium breeding programs rely on accurate pedigrees to manage the genetics and demographics of captive populations. Breeding recommendations are often encumbered, however, by unknown parentage. If an individual has any amount of unknown ancestry, the relationships between that individual and all other individuals in a population are ambiguous, and breeding recommendations cannot be ta...

BACKGROUND Null alleles complicate parentage testing because they do not contribute positively to phenotypes.Objectives. To survey South African populations for null alleles at short tandem repeat (STR) loci used in parentage testing. METHODS Paternity case data were scanned for apparent contradictions compared with Mendelian inheritance that could be due to null alleles. Estimates of null al...

Likelihood methods have been developed to partition individuals in a sample into sibling clusters using genetic marker data without parental information. Most of these methods assume either both sexes are monogamous to infer full sibships only or only one sex is polygamous to infer full sibships and paternal or maternal (but not both) half sibships. We extend our previous method to the more gen...

The degree to which group members share reproduction is dictated by both within-group (e.g. group size and composition) and between-group(e.g. density and position of neighbours) characteristics. While many studies have investigated reproductive patterns within social groups, few have simultaneously explored how within-group and between-group social structure influence these patterns. Here, we ...

Since the middle of the 1990s, parentage assignment using microsatellite markers has been introduced as a tool in aquaculture breeding. It now allows close to 100% assignment success, and offered new ways to develop aquaculture breeding using mixed family designs in commercial conditions. Its main achievements are the knowledge and control of family representation and inbreeding, especially in ...