Myogenin gene (MYoG) affects the synthesis of muscle myofibrillar growth and increase of meat production. The myostatin (MSTN) gene is identified as a specific negative regulator of skeletal muscle growth. Reduction of the expression level of MSTN throughmutation in the sequence of this gene leads to an increase of myogenesis and regeneration of muscle cells during the postnatal growing period ...

One hundred years ago, there were more than 48 million sheep in the United States. In 1910, they were valued at $4/head, with 43% of income coming from the sale of sheep, lambs, and meat and 57% coming from wool. Over the years, fluctuations in this ratio have challenged the breeder and researcher alike. By 2007, sheep numbers had declined to 6.2 million, with the average sheep shearing 3.4 kg ...

New Zealand is a small Pacific nation 1600 km east 01 Australia and thus is far from the population centers of the Northern Hemisphere its major markets. New Zealand has an area of approximately 268,000 km2 (comparable to the area of the state of Colorado) and a population of just over three million. Its economy is based largely on the pastoral production of sheep and cattle: The meat industry ...

In order to estimate economic values of productive traits (meat, milk and wool) in Taleshi native sheep breed of Iran, records from economic parameters and performance of local Taleshi flocks were used. The economic values of traits were used to select the maximum profit estimation also to study the sensitivity rate of the model the effects of 20 percent increase / decrease in the price of milk...

Small ruminants (goats and sheep) form an important economic and ecological niche in agricultural systems throughout the developing countries. Their current contribution is not commensurate with the potential capacity for higher levels of production. The context for productivity enhancement and increased socioeconomic contribution relates to large population size, wide distribution across vario...

The objective of this study was to determine the effect of municipal abattoir conditions and animal factors on avoidance-related behaviour (AB) of sheep at slaughter, bleeding times (BT) and mutton quality. The behaviour of 66 castrates and 19 ewes of different age categories was observed at three stages of slaughter. Higher behaviour scores indicated higher levels of AB. Time intervals between...

Meat adulteration is a worldwide concern. In this paper, a new droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) method was developed for the quantitative determination of the presence of chicken in sheep and goat meat products. Meanwhile, a constant (multiplication factor) was introduced to transform the ratio of copy numbers to the proportion of meats. The presented ddPCR method was also proved to be more accurate...

Sheep is an important livestock in the world for meat, dairy and wool production. The third version of sheep reference genome has been recently assembled, but sheep DNA methylome has not been profiled yet. In this study, we report the comprehensive sheep methylome with 94.38% cytosine coverage at single base resolution by sequencing DNA samples from Longissimus dorsi of dizygotic Sunit sheep, w...