With companion animals, there is a large diversity in breeding practices, which may impact genetic variability and health of selected breeds. Based on a survey, we illustrate the specificities of scent hound dog breeders regarding either their breeding goals or their mating practices. Mating between close relatives are also investigated in different cat breeds. Such mating are more or less freq...

Mixed linear models are assumed in most animal breeding applications. Convenient methods for computing BLUE of the estimable linear functions of the fixed elements of the model and for computing best linear unbiased predictions of the random elements of the model have been available. Most data available to animal breeders, however, do not meet the usual requirements of random sampling, the prob...

In the future, breeders may apply reproductive, computational, and genomic methods to global populations nearly as easily as with national populations now. Dairy cattle breeders exchange traditional breeding values worldwide via Interbull, and new methods are outlined for exchanging either genomic evaluations or genotypes. Goals are to adapt multi-trait across country evaluation (MACE) in the s...

For millennia, seeds have been freely available to use for farming and plant breeding without restriction. Within the past century, however, intellectual property rights (IPRs) have threatened this tradition. In response, a movement has emerged to counter the trend toward increasing consolidation of control and ownership of plant germplasm. One effort, the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI, www...

In South Africa, the Dairy Swiss breed, which originated in Switzerland, consists of 27 breeders and 1135 breeding cows. Pedigree information on the breed was analysed to determine its effective population size (Ne) and rate of inbreeding. The rate of inbreeding was 0.08% per year and 0.38% per generation. It was estimated that in 2008, over 90% of the animals were inbred. This is within the ac...

Staff at the Animal Genetics and Breeding Unit (AGBU) have contributed to better use of genetically superior pigs in the Australian pig industry through R&D projects conducted in cooperation with breeders, the development of genetic evaluations tools (PIGBLUP, National Pig Improvement Program (NPIP), PBSELECT), training of industry personnel in genetic principles and provision of fee-based cons...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY We developed microsatellites from Fothergilla ×intermedia to establish loci capable of distinguishing species and cultivars, and to assess genetic diversity for use by ornamental breeders and to transfer within Hamamelidaceae. METHODS AND RESULTS We sequenced a small insert genomic library enriched for microsatellites to develop 12 polymorphic microsatellite loci. The num...

Plant breeding, the science of crop production, has traditionally developed new cultivars through selective breeding in the spirit of Gregor Mendel (1965) and his peas. Plant breeders hybridize plants that have been selected for some desired trait. By hybridizing desirable plants, desirable alleles—and combinations of alleles—are concentrated, thereby improving the fitness of the offspring. Pla...

Animal breeding was, until the beginning of the twentieth century, a relatively uncontrolled activity based mainly on the animal’s physical appearance. The early animal breeders did not really have the knowledge and tools to predict and control what they were doing. This changed in the first half of the twentieth century, when Mendelian genetics was applied in farm animal breeding. Later, the s...