Invasive alien species can have serious adverse impacts on both the environment and the economy. Being able to predict the impacts of an alien species could assist in preventing or reducing these impacts. This study aimed to establish whether there are any life history traits consistently correlated with the impacts of alien birds across two continents, Europe and Australia, as a first step tow...

The aim of this study was to estimate allelic and genotypic frequencies of five DNA markers that are positional and functional candidates for milk production traits in Czech Fleckvieh cattle. In addition, we evaluated the association of these markers with milk production traits and breeding values for milk production traits and also estimated linkage disequilibrium (LD) between two markers with...

Data collected from 690 purebred Duroc pigs from 2009 to 2012 were used to estimate the heritability, and genetic and phenotypic correlations between production and meat quality traits. Variance components were obtained through the restricted maximum likelihood procedure using Wombat and SAS version 9.0. Animals were raised under the same management in five different breeding farms. The average...

Biofuels provide a promising route of producing energy while reducing reliance on petroleum. Developing sustainable liquid fuel production from cellulosic feedstock is a major challenge and will require significant breeding efforts to maximize plant biomass production. Our approach to elucidating genes and genetic pathways that can be targeted for improving biomass production is to exploit the ...

SUMMARY Corn, soybean, and sunflower hybrids with improved agronomic and nutritional traits are grown widely today. Barring increased concern about genetically altered crops, production of specialty grains is likely to increase because novel traits possessed by many new hybrids are desired by both grain producers and grain users. Most specialty grains available today possess improved altered " ...

This study was conducted to estimate the potential acid production value (PAPV) of major diets and to determine the relationship between dietary PAPV and dairy production traits. Estimation of PAPV of major cattle feeds was based on an in vitro technique, which determined the degree of Ca dissociation from CaCO3. Data on feeds and production traits were collected on 744 multiparous lactating Ho...

This study investigated the improvement in genetic evaluation of fertility traits by using production traits as secondary traits (MILK = 305-d milk yield, FAT = 305-d fat yield, and PROT = 305-d protein yield). Data including 471,742 records from first lactations of Denmark Holstein cows, covering the years of inseminations during first lactations from 1995 to 2004, were analyzed. Six fertility...

The objective of the study was to investigate the relationship between health and production traits in chickens. The data were obtained from a closed, fully pedigreed, commercial broiler line. Records included measurements of body weight (BW), residual feed intake (RFI), percent breast meat (PBM), and two health traits (H1 and H2) from 13,665 birds and 1,524 hens with progeny records. Productio...