Software was developed to predict selection responses and rates of inbreeding from livestock breeding programs. Variance components are needed as input for the program, which subsequently enables the user to evaluate various breeding program designs. Consequently, breeding program structures with discrete (e.g., fish or poultry breeding) or overlapping generations (e.g., pig or cattle breeding)...

Introduction Today, a wide range of molecular tools and powerful computers provides us with an unprecedented capacity to generate data that reveals the architecture of genomes, genes, traits, and how these contribute to the value of the germplasm units (populations, lines, varieties, hybrids, cultivars) used in breeding programs. Complementary work is characterising the key environmental variab...

Achieving a consistently successful A.I.-breeding program in a cow-calf operation requires attention to those heifers and cows not having normal estrous cycles (cycling) at the beginning of the breeding season. Because so many factors contribute to whether breeding females are cycling, including weather patterns, nutrition (availability of native forages or stored feeds), age or days since calv...

How can disciplinary research in physiology complement wheat breeding? This introductory chapter is intended to provide broad guidelines to help breeding programs: 1) assess whether physiological criteria should be included in a breeding strategy; 2) evaluate specific physiological selection traits and determine their usefulness in breeding. The other chapters in this book provide more explicit...

knowledge of traits associated with drought tolerance would be useful for developing breeding materials fortarget environments. to study these traits, 119 spring durum wheat breeding lines (bls) from the international maize and wheat improvement center (cimmyt) were evaluated along with local checks (one modern cultivar and three landraces) in three experiments under terminal and non-terminal d...