and Implications The relationships between body condition score (BCS) observed during the first 45 days of lactation and two measures of feed efficiency, residual feed intake (RFI) and gross efficiency (GE) defined as milk energy / DMI, measured during mid-lactation were assessed in 255 first lactation Holstein cows. No significant differences in BCS at calving and at approximately 40 days in m...

Data from 1006 pigs selected for breeding and subsequently scored at 22-24 weeks of age were used to estimate heritabilities for conformation traits. Front wrists, front pasterns, back hocks, back pasterns, front view, rear view and back shape were each subjectively scored by a single operator. For the individual traits heritability estimates ranged from high (0.42±0.09 for front pasterns) to n...

Twenty eight lactating buffaloes were used in a completely randomized design with 2×2 factorial arrangement of four experimental diets including low protein–low energy (LP-LE), low protein–high energy (LP-HE), high protein–low energy (HP-LE) and high protein–high energy (HP-HE). Results showed that the HP-HE diet recorded the highest digestibility coefficients of CP, EE, NFE, nutritive values, ...

A study was conducted to evaluate efficacyof wheat based vs. corn based diets on growth performance, carcass traits,blood parameters, jejunum morphological development, immunity, cecal microflora and excreta moisture in broiler chicks fed according to digestible essential amino acid profile. One hundred forty day old Ross 308 male broiler chicks randomly distributed into ten separated floor pen...

This study was conducted to examine the effects of feed restriction on production performance as well as traits relating to egg and carcass yield in Potchefstroom Koekoek dual purpose chicken bred under Ethiopian conditions. A total of 240 one-day-old dual purpose Koekoek chicks were randomly distributed into 12 experimental pens, representing 4 feeding treatments to evaluate the performance of...

Feed efficiency and carcass characteristics are late-measured traits. The detection of molecular markers associated with them can help breeding programs to select animals early in life, and to predict breeding values with high accuracy. The objective of this study was to identify polymorphisms in the functional and positional candidate gene NEUROD1 (neurogenic differentiation 1), and investigat...

Several measures of life cycle cow efficiency were calculated using weights and individual feed consumptions recorded on 160 dams of beef, dairy and beef X dairy breeding and their progeny. Ratios of output to input were used to estimate efficiency, where outputs included weaning weights of progeny plus salvage value of the dam and inputs included creep feed consumed by progeny plus feed consum...

The current research was conducted to estimate the heritability coefficients and the genetic correlations for performance and carcass and body composition traits in a single sire broiler line. The performance traits analyzed were BW at 38 d, ultrasound records of pectoral muscle depth, feed intake, feed conversion ratio, and BW at 42 d. The carcass traits analyzed were eviscerated BW, breast we...

Postpartum dam performance was studied in a complete diallel design involving five lines of mice. The selection criterion in each line was: large litter size at birth (L+); large 6-wk body weight (W+); an index for large litter size and small 6-wk body weight (L+W-); the complementary index (L-W+) and random (K). Females from the five lines and 20 reciprocal F1 crosses were mated to sires of a ...