Texel sheep were imported from Finland and Denmark for evaluation as a terminal sire population relative to the Suffolk breed. The objective was to estimate effects of sire breed on fitness, growth, and compositional traits of crossbred progeny that were serially slaughtered at 63, 105, 147, and 189 d of age. A total of 325 lambs, sired by 19 Texel and 20 Suffolk rams, were born to mature, half...

Records (2,910) of birth (BWT), weaning (WW), and yearling weight (YW) of F1 calves produced in a top-cross experiment involving Angus, Hereford, Pooled Hereford, Charolais, Limousin, Simmental, Gelbvieh, Maine-Anjou, Chianina, Tarentaise, Shorthorn, and Salers bulls mated to Hereford and Angus cows and records (4,592) of WW on three-breed-cross calves out of 986 F1 females of the same breed cr...

Records on growth traits were obtained from five Midwestern agricultural experiment stations as part of a beef cattle crossbreeding project (NC-196). Records on birth weight (BWT, n =3,490), weaning weight (WWT, n = 3,237), and yearling weight (YWT, n = 1,372) were analyzed within locations and pooled across locations to obtain estimates of breed of sire differences. Solutions for breed of sire...

The purpose of this article is to describe a program for evaluation of seedstock populations in the swine industry. Differences among seedstock populations for economically important traits must be identified in order for pork producers to efficiently use available genetic resources. National genetic evaluation programs have the potential to identify the important differences among populations ...

Two data sets from the USDA Livestock and Range Research Laboratory were analyzed to study dominance variance and the influence of dominance relationships. The first consisted of 4,155 birth weight (3,884 weaning weight) records of inbred USDA Line 1 Herefords. The second consisted of 8,065 birth weight (7,380 weaning weight) records from a line-cross experiment with five lines. Two models were...

This study aimed to evaluate whether the host genetic background impact the ruminal microbial communities of the progeny of sires from three different breeds under different diets. Eighty five bacterial and twenty eight methanogen phylotypes from 49 individuals of diverging sire breed (Angus, ANG; Charolais, CHA; and Hybrid, HYB), fed high energy density (HE) and low energy density (LE) diets w...

Lethal recessive genes that cause early embryo loss are difficult to detect. Nonreturn rate at 70 d after first insemination (NR) was evaluated as a trait of the embryo using 1,739,055 first-service records from 1,251 Holstein bulls represented as both service sires and sires of cows. Effects modeled included herd-year-season, parity of cow, sire of cow, service bull, interaction of service bul...

Maximum likelihood methods for the estimation of linkage disequilibrium between biallelic DNA-markers in half-sib families (half-sib method) are developed for single and multifamily situations. Monte Carlo computer simulations were carried out for a variety of scenarios regarding sire genotypes, linkage disequilibrium, recombination fraction, family size, and number of families. A double hetero...

A sire-maternal grandsire threshold model was used for genetic evaluation of stillbirth in US Holsteins. Calving ease and stillbirth records for herds reporting at least 10 dead calves were extracted from the Animal Improvement Programs Laboratory database. About half of the 14 million calving ease records in the database had a known livability score, mostly from herds processed by Dairy Record...