BACKGROUND Bovine renal lipofuscinosis (BRL) is an incidental finding in cattle at slaughter. Condemnation of the kidneys as unfit for human consumption was until recently considered the only implication of BRL. Recent studies have indicated a negative influence on the health of affected animals. The present study investigated the prevalence, genetics and effect of BRL on milk yield and weight ...

Pure Holstein (HO, n=430), crosses between Swedish Red and HO (SRxHO, n=41), Montbeliarde and HO (MOxHO, n=18), and MO and SRxHO (MOxSH, n=53) were compared for milk, fat and protein yield, fat and protein percentage, somatic cell count (SCC), milking time (MT), and age at fi rst and second calving. A total of 180,933 test-day information for milk yield and MT, and 5,249 for fat and protein per...

Polledness is a high impact trait in modern milk and beef production to meet the demands of animal welfare and work safety. Previous studies have mapped the polled-locus to the proximal region of the bovine chromosome 1 (BTA1) and narrowed it down to approximately 1 Mb. Sequencing of the positional candidate genes within the 1 Mb polled region and whole genome sequencing of Holsteins revealed a...

To characterize some of the physiological features of Japanese beef breeds, plasma concentrations of insulin and metabolites and carcass composition were measured in five Japanese Black, five Japanese Brown, and four Holstein steers (6.2 mo; 164 kg). The steers were raised under typical feeding conditions in Japan until they were slaughtered at 600 to 700 kg BW. Blood samples were collected at ...

In the present study, records on 22872 first-parity Holsteins collected from 131 herds by the Animal Breeding and Improvement Center of Iran from 1995 to 2014 were considered to estimate genetic and phenotypic relationships between calving difficulty (CD) and the lactation curve traits, including initial milk yield (Ap), ascending (Bp) and descending (Cp) slope of the lactation curves, peak mil...

The effects of reference population size and the availability of information from genotyped ancestors on the accuracy of imputation of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) were investigated for Mexican Holstein cattle. Three scenarios for reference population size were examined: (1) a local population of 2,011 genotyped Mexican Holsteins, (2) animals in scenario 1 plus 866 Holsteins in the US ...