Recent studies of mammalian genomes have uncovered the vast extent of copy number variations (CNVs) that contribute to phenotypic diversity. Compared to SNP, a CNV can cover a wider chromosome region, which may potentially incur substantial sequence changes and induce more significant effects on phenotypes. CNV has been becoming an alternative promising genetic marker in the field of genetic an...

CSN1S1is one of the major genes encoding milk proteins of mammals. In this study we determined allele frequencies of CSN1S1-5` flanking region as well as exon 17 variants and their effects on milk traits in three indigenous cattle breeds Mazandarani, Golpaygani (Bos indicus) and Sarabi (Bos taurus) and Holstein cattle in Iran. CSN1S1*B variant was nearly fixed in Holstein but ranged from 0.40 t...

mastitis is one of the most serious and costly diseases affecting dairy cattle production. in the present study, effects of a lactoferrin gene polymorphism (intron 6) on milk somatic cell count (scc) and subclinical mastitis was investigated in 121 holstein dairy cattle. two alleles of a and b and two genotypes of aa and ab were found in an ecori recognized single nucleotide polymorphism in int...

To develop an efficient DNA typing system for Chinese Holstein cattle, 17 microsatellites, which were amplified in four fluorescent multiplex reactions and genotyped by two capillary electrophoresis injections, were evaluated for parentage verification and identity test. These markers were highly polymorphic with a mean of 8.35 alleles per locus and an average expected heterozygosity of 0.711 i...

The phylogenetic diversity of the fecal bacterial community in Holstein cattle was determined by 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequence analysis. The sequences were affiliated with the following phyla: Firmicutes (81.3%), Bacteroidetes (14.4%), Actinobacteria (2.5%), and Proteobacteria (1.4%). The Clostridium leptum subgroup was the most phylogenetically diverse group in cattle feces. In addition, a n...

Bovine leukocyte antigens (BoLA) are extensively used as markers for bovine disease and immunological traits. However, none of the BoLA genes in Southeast Asian breeds have been characterized by polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-sequence-based typing (SBT). Therefore, we sequenced exon 2 of the BoLA class II DRB3 gene from 1120 individual cows belonging to the Holstein, Sahiwal, Simbrah, Jersey, ...

Crossbreeding is a popular tool for genetic improvement of pigs, beef cattle, and other livestock species, but its use in US dairy cattle has been limited for several reasons. The primary reason is the advantage of Holstein cows in milk volume, coupled with a milk pricing system that still tends to reward quantity, rather than quality, in many regions of the country (i.e., through volume premiu...

Homologous recombination has been a focus of basic research for over a hundred years [1–3]. The advent of genomics has allowed fine-scale analyses of recombination, including genomewide analysis of global recombination rate [4–6] and hotspot usage (the proportion of recombination that occurs at hotspots) [4,6]. Recently, PLOS Genetics published the work of Ma et al. [7] describing a genome-wide...

Heat stress has negative effects on pregnancy rates of lactating dairy cattle. There are genetic differences in tolerance to heat stress; Bos taurus indicus (B. t. indicus) cattle and embryos are more thermotolerant than Bos taurus taurus (B. t. taurus). In the present study, the effects of sire and sire breed on conception and embryonic/fetal loss rates of lactating Holstein cows during the Br...

Weed seeds may maintain their viability when passing through the digestive tract of cattle and can be therefore dispersed by animal movement or the application of manure. Whether different cattle types of the same species can cause differential weed seed fate is largely unknown to us particularly under non-grazed systems similar to Holstein-Friesian dairy farming. We investigated the effect on ...