Subfertility has negative effects for dairy farm profitability, animal welfare and sustainability of animal production. Increasing herd sizes and economic pressures restrict the amount of time that farmers can spend on counteractive management. Genetic improvement will become increasingly important to restore reproductive performance. Complementary to traditional breeding value estimation proce...

The genetic networks that govern the differentiation and growth of major tissues of economic importance in the chicken are largely unknown. Under a functional genomics project, our consortium has generated 30 609 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and developed several chicken DNA microarrays, which represent the Chicken Metabolic/Somatic (10 K) and Neuroendocrine/Reproductive (8 K) Systems (http:/...

Pigs were among the first animals to be domesticated and pork is one of the most widely eaten meats in the world today. The pig has also been an excellent biomedical model for understanding a variety of human health issues such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, female reproductive health, cardiovascular disease, and infectious diseases. Genome sequencing, mapping, expression and functional analyses...

Species of the genus Drosophila exhibit enormous variation in all of their reproductive behaviors: resource use and specialization, courtship signaling, sperm utilization, and female remating. The genetic bases of this variability and its evolution are poorly understood. At the same time, Drosophila comparative genomics now has developed to a point at which approaches previously only possible w...

Despite it being the darling of fungal genomics, we know little about either the ecology or reproductive biology of the budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, in nature. A recent study by Ruderfer et al. estimated that the ancestors of three S. cerevisiae genomes outcrossed approximately once every 50,000 generations, confirming the view that outcrossing is infrequent in natural populations o...

Recent advances in genomics and biotechnology have ushered in a new era in health development. Therapeutic cloning possesses enormous potential for revolutionizing medical and therapeutic techniques. Cloning technology, however, is perceived as having the potential for reproductive cloning, which raises serious ethical and moral concerns. It is important that the Islamic countries come to a con...

Pigs were among the first animals to be domesticated and pork is one of the most widely eaten meats in the world today. The pig has also been an excellent biomedical model for understanding a variety of human health issues such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, female reproductive health, cardiovascular disease, and infectious diseases. Genome sequencing, mapping, expression and functional analyses...

As a common cause of reproductive isolation in diverse taxa, hybrid incompatibilities are fundamentally important to speciation. A key question is which evolutionary forces drive the initial substitutions within species that lead to hybrid dysfunction. Previously, we discovered a simple genetic incompatibility that causes nearly complete male sterility and partial female sterility in hybrids be...

Equipped with Mendel's laws and only rudimentary knowledge of genes and genomes, the architects of the Modern Synthesis provided key insights into the dynamics of gene frequency change within populations. Extension of population genetic models to speciation identified Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibilities (negative epistatic interactions between genes from isolated populations) as the primary cau...