Background: With the increasing concern for health and nutrition, dietary fat has attracted considerable attention. The composition of fatty acids in the diet is important because they are associated with major diseases including cancers, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. The fatty acid synthase (FASN) and stearoyl-CoA desaturase (delta-9-desaturase) (SCD) genes affect fatty acid compositio...

India is the foremost milk producing nation of the world, and homes the largest domesticated bovine population. But the average productivity of indigenous/non-descript animals is far below than that of Taurine cattle. Crossbreeding of low producing indigenous and nondescript cattle with high producing exotic breeds like Holstein Friesian and Jersey is followed as the breeding policy of the coun...

Introduction Taurine (Bos taurus) and zebu (Bos indicus) cattle were domesticated independently in the Near East and in India respectively (Beja-Pereira et al., 2006) and are believed to have diverged 117-275,000 years ago (Bradley et al., 2006). Bos taurus cattle were introduced to Australia by European settlers in the end of the 18th century. The main B. indicus breed used for beef production...

Inbreeding with close relatives and outbreeding with members of distant populations can both result in deleterious shifts in the means of fitness-related characters, most likely for very different reasons. Such processes often occur simultaneously and have important implications for the evolution of mating systems, dispersal strategies, and speciation. They are also relevant to the design of br...

a crossbreeding experiment involving four iranian fat-tailed sheep breeds, namely kurdi (k), chaal (c), afshari (a) and sanjabi (s) was carried out to determine the ram breed effects on productivity of kurdi fat-tailed ewes (k) under extensive production system. a total of 475 kurdi ewes were mated to 24 rams from four breeds producing 454 lambs including pure kurdi, kk, (116 lambs), afshari × ...

With progressively faster global change, shifts in phenology, and distributional ranges are reported for an increasing number of species. The success of organisms at coping with novel seasonal conditions depends on the mechanisms that determine their schedules. Species that rely on fixed schedules and those that time their activities by predictive cues may be particularly constrained in their a...