Implementation of genomic selection in sheep breeding provides a number of challenges, compared to dairy cattle, because of the higher genetic diversity between and within sheep breeds, the cost of maintaining reference populations and the limited ability of individual breeders to invest in genotyping. Within this study, we compare theoretical and realized genomic prediction accuracies for trai...

Scrapie is a fatal neurodegenerative disease of sheep and goats belonging to the group of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE). TSEs are characterised by distinctive pathology, the involvement of a hostencoded prion protein (PrP) in disease development and genetic control of susceptibility. Polymorphisms in three different codons of the ovine prion protein (PrP) gene (136, 154, 171) ...

BACKGROUND Following EU decision 2003/100/EC Member States have recently implemented sheep breeding programmes to reduce the prevalence of sheep with TSE susceptible prion genotypes. The present paper investigates the progress of the breeding programme in the Netherlands. The PrP genotype frequencies were monitored through time using two sets of random samples: one set covers the years 2005 to ...

the present study was performed to evaluate the on-station growth performance of local and dorper × local crossbred sheep in eastern amhara region, ethiopia. data on 302 lambs collected over a 4-year period (2009 to 2012) on local and dorper × local crossbred sheep at sirinka breeding, evaluation and distribution site were used in this study. fixed effects considered were breed, lamb sex, birth...

Breeding ewes to lamb at 1 yr of age can improve profitability for some production systems. The first objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of age and weight at breeding and total postweaning weight gain on reproductive performance of ewe lambs. The second objective was to compare the effects of weight and age variables in four major sheep breeds (Columbia, Polypay, Rambouillet, an...

Early growth traits in sheep are economically important. Breeding for these traits has been shown to be problematic using quantitative genetic methods, particularly in native sheep herds. Molecular genetics is useful for sheep breeding. The gene for insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) is one of the important candidate genes known for ovine early growth traits. The aim of this study was to inves...

The data were collected from 1992 to 2009 in Burri, White Boni and Black Boni sheep maintained at the Regional Research Station in the Central Highlands of Yemen. Data were analyzed to study the effects of environmental and genetic factors on body weight and growth rate from birth to weaning. The least square means for body weights (BW) were 2.54, 2.18 and 2.26 kg for birth; 12.49, 10.58 and 11...