The Swedish dairy cow has almost doubled its annual milk yield over a few decades. This has simultaneously led to an increase in the dietary proportion of concentrate in order to meet the increased nutritional requirement of dairy cows. The proportion of forage is often below 50% of dry matter (DM) intake in conventional dairy production on an annual basis. However, the regulations for organic ...

Real time-qPCR is the most reliable method for evaluation of mRNA expression levels. However, to obtain accurate results, selection of suitable reference genes is necessary for normalizing the real-time qPCR data. The aim of this research was to validate the expression stability of three potential reference genes (ACTB, GAPDH and UXT) in milk somatic cells of Holstein dairy cattle under differe...

Brangus cows (n = 29) were used in three experiments to evaluate the effects of parity (multiparous vs. primiparous) and potential genetic merit for milk production (high vs. low) on forage intake during late gestation, early lactation, and late lactation. Cows were selected for milk production based on their sire's EPD for milk production (MEPD). Cows had ad libitum access to (130% of previous...

Impressive progress has been made during the past 15 years in our understanding of the biology of somatotropin (ST) in domestic animals. In part, this progress was sparked by advances in biotechnology that made feasible the production of large quantities of recombinant bovine ST (bST) and porcine ST (pST). The availability of recombinant bST and pST resulted in an exponential increase in invest...

Mastitis is a complex disease with critical outcomes. Subclinical mastitis (SCM) although lacks clinical signs but it has a profound effect on milk production if occurs during early lactation. The purpose of the study, was to investigate the changes that occur in plasma metabolite levels before development of mastitis during early lactation. To evaluate the association, blood samples were colle...

To evaluate lactation performance and changes in plasma and fecal lipopolysaccharide (LPS) concentrations in response to the supplementation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae fermentation product (SC), two dairy farms were selected. On each farm, 32 cows in early to mid lactation (21 to 140 DIM) were blocked by parity and days in milk (DIM), and randomly assigned to one of the two treatments within b...

The mammary gland is a relatively unique tissue in that it may undergo repeated cyclic phases of development, functional differentiation and regression. The carryover of mammary tissue from one lactation cycle to the next can vary considerably among sows, particularly considering the number of glands that they may have and the range of litter sizes. When a sow farrows, she has a set number of p...

Handling large-scale industry data is challenging both in the preliminary screening of data for validation, and also in the subsequent statistical analyses to obtain estimates of fixed effects, genetic parameters and estimated breeding values (EBVs). This paper summarises how a small subset from large industry-derived dairy data records have been explored and edited to be ready for genetic anal...

Magnocellular oxytocin (OT) and vasopressin (VP) neurons adopt different firing patterns in response to relevant physiological stimuli. OT neurons selectively display short (2-4 sec), high-frequency bursts of action potentials that are highly synchronized and correlated with OT release during lactation. The present experiments were done to determine whether the electrophysiological properties o...

The present study aimed to determine the potential of front face fluorescence spectroscopy (FFFS) to discriminate between milk samples belonging to Sicilo-Sarde ewes fed with three different feeding groups –named control, scotch bean meal and soybean meal– throughout the lactation stage (11 weeks). Milk samples were classified by factorial discriminant analysis. Similar results were obtained by...