Dairy producers have selected for higher milk production for many years. Genetic improvement causes an average Holstein cow born in 2003 to produce over 7,000 pounds more milk in one lactation than her ancestor born in 1960 produced. Type traits, particularly udders and feet and legs, have also improved because of intensive selection. However, the health and fertility of dairy cows cannot be in...

The history and status of aquaculture genetics in Israel were reviewed a few years ago (Hulata 1995). The current report reviews trends and progress of the second half of the 1990s, and provides the vision and perspective for the next couple of years. Selective breeding work is currently focused mainly on tilapias (Oreochromis sp.) and gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata). Edible and ornamental co...

We consider how to improve railway timetables. As case we take the Rompnet of the dutch railways, a highly constrained problem, containing both hard and soft constraints. We show how to cast the constraints into the format of the Genocop system. Every train should run every hour at the same time and hence the constraints should be interpreted modulo sixty. This gives a non-convex search space o...

We describe a call for an international coordinated effort in rice functional genomics in the form of a project named RICE2020. Themission of the project will be: to determine the function of every gene in the rice genome by the year 2020, to identify functional diversity of alleles for agriculturally useful genes from the primary gene pool of rice, and to apply the findings of functional genom...

Clonal stability of tree dryness was evaluated in eleven clones of Hevea brasiliensis at the Rubber Research Institute of Nigeria. The experimental design was the randomized complete block with three replicates and ten trees per replicate. The clones were evaluated in three locations. Four stability parameters were applied. The stability parameters were: environmental variance, regression index...

In the goal of genetic improvement of livestock by marker assisted selection, we aim at reconstructing the haplotypes of sires from their offspring. We reformulated this problem into a binary weighted constraint satisfaction problem. Our results showed these problems have a small treewidth and can be solved optimally, improving haplotype reconstruction compared to previous approaches especially...

This article explores whether laws that restrict the communication of genetic test results may, under certain circumstances, violate the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The focus is whether investigators have a right to return results from non-CLIA-certified laboratories in situations where a research participant requests the results and the investigator is willing to share them but i...