Breeding of excellent rice varieties is essential for modern rice production. Typical breeding procedures to introduce and maintain valuable agricultural traits require at least 8 generations from crossing to stabilization, always taking more than 4-5 years of work. This long and tedious process is the rate-limiting step in the development of new varieties, and therefore fast culturing methods ...

An ostrich breeding flock, joined as individual breeding pairs (n = 136 pairs), was used to investigate the possibility of diagnostic ultrasonography as a method to predict the reproductive performance of ostrich females during a breeding season. Follicular activity was easily detected and quantified by using diagnostic ultrasonography. One to 8 follicles were recorded in 25% of females scanned...

Avian pox, a disease caused by avipoxviruses, is a major cause of decline of some endangered bird species. While its impact has been assessed in several species in the wild, effects of the disease in conservation breeding have never been studied. Houbara bustard species (Chlamydotis undulata and Chlamydotis macqueenii), whose populations declined in the last decades, have been captive bred for ...

Dog Rose is one of the most important species in Rosaceae family used as a medicinal plant and a rootstock for ornamental roses. This species is native to Iran, therefore, identification of indigenous genotypes of this species is important for genetic preservation or breeding purposes. Genetic diversity estimation of plant materials is one of the important pre-breeding activities in breeding cr...

In previous versions of PIGBLUP, breeders had no knowledge of the accuracy with which specific estimated breeding values (EBV’s) were calculated. This was generally of no concern. Replacement breeding stock were selected based on EBV’s knowing that young animals will generally have EBV’s with similar accuracies. Consequently, even if accuracy was an issue for the breeder, there would be little ...

Detailed three-dimensional neutronics analysis has been performed for ITER with the U.S. solid breeder blanket utilizing sintered product materials for both the breeder and multiplier. The overall tritium breeding ratio is 0.81 with two outboard breeder zones and 0.89 for the three outboard breeder zone design option. The total reactor thermal power is 1150 MW in the technology phase.

1. Ecological conditions and constraints are considered to be important for the evolution of cooperative breeding. However, the importance of the costs of resource acquisition to the decision of subordinates to stay or leave and to help or not have been hardly studied experimentally. Here we reduced the overall food availability (zooplankton) for experimental populations of the cooperatively br...

This study tries to connect the poultry food behavior to the visual and tactile characteristics of the food. The aim of the work is to make it possible to control the visual and tactile aspects of food (food pellets), by means of image analysis. These aspects are often suspected to explain the undesirable behavior of the poultries, which can reject a food, showing however optimal nutritional ch...

Cooperative breeding is a social behaviour in which certain individuals will opt to delay or forgo their own reproduction in order to help other individuals. Cooperative breeding is one of the most conspicuous examples of cooperation in nature. However, theoretical understanding of why this behaviour occurs is lacking and contradictory. In this thesis, I examine the role played by ecological co...