Although China and India are the two largest tea-producing countries, the domestication origin and breeding history of the tea plant in these two countries remain unclear. Our previous study suggested that the tea plant includes three distinct lineages (China type tea, Chinese Assam type tea and Indian Assam type tea), which were independently domesticated in China and India, respectively. To d...

Migratory bird species that feed on air-borne insects are experiencing widespread regional declines, but these remain poorly understood. Agricultural intensification in the breeding range is often regarded as one of the main drivers of these declines. Here, we tested the hypothesis that body mass in breeding individuals should reflect habitat quality in an aerial insectivore, the tree swallow (...

Identification of genetic polymorphisms and subsequent development of molecular markers is important for marker assisted breeding of superior cultivars of economically important species. Sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.) is an economically important non-climacteric tree fruit crop in the Rosaceae family and has undergone a genetic bottleneck due to breeding, resulting in limited genetic diversity ...

Forests and forestry will encounter several changes of unknown magnitude within the coming decades. In Nordic, long rotations complicate any anticipation to upcoming changes. Tree breeding can contribute coping with these The time span implementing results in practice may be shortened through vegetative propagation. Introducing propagation forest regeneration phase challenges before adopt...

The control of primary sex-ratio by vertebrates has become a major focus in biology in recent years. Evolutionary theory predicts that a differential effect of maternal characteristics on the fitness of sons and daughters is an important route, whereby selection is expected to favour a bias towards the production of one sex. However, despite experimental evidence for adaptive brood sex-ratio ma...

species. Single-brooded species are adapted to time breeding so that their nestlings are in the nest when food is most plentiful (Lack 1954). In contrast, species that breed more than once per season seem to opt for a different tactic, by maximizing the number of annual broods. In this regard, Lack (1954) suggested that multi-brooded species should lay as soon as conditions permit. This notion ...

apple (malus×domestica borkh.) is the fourth fruit in importance and iran ranks fifth in apple production in the world. longevity of juvenility in apple extends breeding cycles and makes its breeding a tough job. to alleviate this barrier via genetic engineering, the genes involved in flowering and floral development of apple and their function must be identified and characterized. most of thes...

A study was conducted on 440 dairy cattle in six organized dairy farms in the state of Himachal Pradesh, India using tuberculin skin testing (TST) to determine the prevalence of bovine tuberculosis. An overall animal prevalence of 14.31% (63 of 440 animals) and a farm prevalence of 16.67% (1 of 6 farms) were recorded in 6 dairy farms by the TST. Of the six dairy farms studied, one of the farms ...

BACKGROUND Genomic selection (GS) is a recent selective breeding method which uses predictive models based on whole-genome molecular markers. Until now, existing studies formulated GS as the problem of modeling an individual's breeding value for a particular trait of interest, i.e., as a regression problem. To assess predictive accuracy of the model, the Pearson correlation between observed and...