Genetic polymorphisms of the milk protein genes are important because of their effects on quantitative traits and technological properties of milk manufacturing. In the present study we identified the polymorphism of the beta-casein gene in two local sheep breeds (Racka n=98 and Turcana n=111) in Romania. The most studied variants at the ovine beta-casein (CSN2) locus are: A and G variants. Gen...

the objective of this review is to explore the current developments on major genes working on prolific sheep breeds and the mechanism behind it, while identifying the future working points. productivity is the ultimate goal of farm animal production and prolificacy is a key feature in determining productivity in farm animals. ovulation rate in mammals is an intricate process involving genetics ...

Sheep scab mites, Psoroptes ovis, collected from a Merino donor sheep, were used to infest Merino and Dorper sheep, and Angora and Boer goats. Mites were placed on the sheep on 1 or 2 occasions and on 5 occasions on the goats. All the animals were examined at regular intervals for the presence of scab lesions and living mites. Both sheep breeds developed lesions, but those on the Merino sheep w...

Sheep are among the major economically important livestock species worldwide because the animals produce milk, wool, skin, and meat. In the present study, the Illumina OvineSNP50 BeadChip was used to investigate genetic diversity and genome selection among Suffolk, Rambouillet, Columbia, Polypay, and Targhee sheep breeds from the United States. After quality-control filtering of SNPs (single nu...

During December mating periods of 2000-2003, wool and meat breeds crossed with East Friesian milk sheep and rams of prolific breeds (Finn or Romanov) were examined laparoscopically. Ovine ovaries were examined between 4 and 9 days after mating. The litter size was recorded and compared with the number of ovulations. The fertility of the analyzed animals was 69.6%, with 192.6% prolificacy. The d...

The introduction of livestock species in Europe has been followed by various genetic events, which created a complex spatial pattern of genetic differentiation. Spatial principal component (sPCA) analysis and spatial metric multidimensional scaling (sMDS) incorporate geography in multivariate analysis. This method was applied to three microsatellite data sets for 45 goat breeds, 46 sheep breeds...

The objective of this cross-sectional study was to detect the presence maedi visna virus (MVV) infections in sheep three counties southwestern Croatia: Istria County, Primorje-Gorski Kotar County and Lika-Senj estimate influence geographical location, breed, age gender as risk factors on prevalence rate. A total 460 randomly selected were tested using a commercially available ID Screen® MVV/CAE...

Knowledge about genetic markers linked to genes affecting quantitative traits can increase the selection response of animal breeding programs, especially for traits that are difficult to improve when using traditional selection (Meuwissen and Goddard, 1996; Meuwissen and Van Arendonk, 1992). The seasonal breeding pattern that is commonly observed in temperate sheep breeds is a major obstacle to...

BACKGROUND Commercial sheep raised for mutton grow faster than traditional Chinese sheep breeds. Here, we aimed to evaluate genetic selection among three different types of sheep breed: two well-known commercial mutton breeds and one indigenous Chinese breed. RESULTS We first combined locus-specific branch lengths and di statistical methods to detect candidate regions targeted by selection in...