Inbreeding depression is of major concern for the conservation of threatened species, and inbreeding avoidance is thought to be a key driver in the evolution of mating systems. However, the estimation of individual inbreeding coefficients in natural populations has been challenging, and, consequently, the full effect of inbreeding on fitness remains unclear. Genomic inbreeding coefficients may ...

It is often assumed that mating with close relatives reduces offspring fitness. In such cases, reduced offspring fitness may arise from inbreeding depression (i.e., genetic effects of elevated homozygosity) or from post-mating maternal investment. This can be due to a reduction in female investment after mating with genetically incompatible males ("differential allocation") or compensation for ...

the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of maternal inbreeding on incidence of twinning,dystocia and stillbirth in holstein cows of iran. calving records from march 2000 to april 2009 comprisingof 365,021 calvings on 153,802 cows from 86 dairy herds were used. the mean level of inbreeding was0.7%, less than 37% of all animals were inbred, and a small proportion (3.45%) of inbree...

The objective of this study was to characterize the population structure and genetic diversity of registered American Red Angus cattle. Inbreeding and average relationship coefficients, effective population size, effective number of founders, and effective number of herds supplying grandparents to the population were calculated from the recorded pedigree. Inbreeding in 1960 was 10.7% and decrea...

The objective of this study was to compare different implementations of genomic selection to a conventional maternal pig breeding scheme, when selection was based partly on production traits and partly on maternal traits. A nucleus pig breeding population with size and structure similar to Norwegian Landrace was simulated where equal weight was used for maternal and production traits. To genoty...

Dystocia scores were recorded by producers on 120,434 Holsteins (218,213 records) from 1985 through 1996; dystocia scores 3 to 5 were coded as difficult births. Stillbirths were recorded for deaths within the first 48 h after birth. Data were restricted to registered cows for pedigree completeness, and inbreeding coefficients were calculated using 5-generation pedigrees. Computational restricti...

The objective of this study was to analyze the development of inbreeding and estimate inbreeding depression in the Danish populations of 3 major meat type sheep breeds. The pedigrees contained 29,336 Texel, 22,838 Shropshire, and 11,487 Oxford Down. The rate of inbreeding was approximately 1% per generation for all breeds, but the rate of increase in co-ancestry was somewhat lower (0.45 to 0.71...

An optimal crossing distance exists within plant populations if inbreeding and outbreeding depression operate simultaneously. In a population of tetraploid Digitalis purpurea, maternal plants were pollinated with donors at four distances: 0 (self-pollination), 1, 6 and 30 m. Lifetime fitness of F1 progeny was investigated in greenhouse experiments, and significant inbreeding and outbreeding dep...

A previous review of inbreeding in natural populations suggested that close inbreeding (inbreeding coefficient f = 0.25) is generally rare in wild birds and mammals. However, the review did not assess rates of moderate inbreeding (f = 0.125), which may make a rather larger contribution to overall inbreeding in a population. Furthermore, previous studies may have underestimated the prevalence of...

A N I M A L breeders often select the extreme individuals in a population. This may conflict with natural selection for reproductive fitness. For example, chickens with intermediate body weights and egg weights usually have the highest hatchability. LATTER and ROBERTSON ( 1962) hypothesized that the decline in fitness with selection for a metric trait is a consequence of gene frequency changes ...