An antagonistic genetic relationship between direct and maternal effects for birth weight (and weaning weight) makes the concurrent genetic improvement of the two traits more challenging than if the correlation was zero or favourable. The direction and magnitude of the genetic correlation between maternal and direct effects for lamb birth weight are equivocal with several moderate negative and ...

Profit from cattle enterprises is influenced by the value of sale animals, less the costs of their production. Ever-changing production and economic circumstances provide both threats and opportunities to cow-calf producers, bull breeders and feedlotters. Feeding strategies and other aspects of management typically require continuous betweenand within-year modification in order to optimize marg...

information required to benchmark yields. These include Growers, breeders and policy makers require benchmarks to measure performance in regard to management of the crop, genetic improvement and prospects for investment and employment. Cropping systems are difficult to benchmark because of the unpredictable nature of the climate. In this paper previous attempts to benchmark sugarcane production...

Dr. Gordon E. Dickerson was a visionary and productive scientist whose many scientific contributions included a systems approach to the genetic improvement of economic efficiency of beef production. His most important contributions to the improvement of beef efficiency include: 1) insisting on an economic definition of the biological objectives of livestock production, 2) promoting multi-discip...

As for any species or population, genetic improvement of dairy cattle involves determining a desirable direction for improvement, identifying traits that provide information to move in that direction, quantifying their heritability, deciding how to evaluate them, and designing a breeding program to achieve the goals. With regard to these issues, dairy cattle are one of the most highly studied o...

The Lethal Yellowing disease is one of the main threats to coconut industry in many parts of Africa and the Caribbean. Planting resistant varieties has long been recognized as one of the most promising ways of controlling it. Considerable efforts have been devoted throughout the world to screening suitable varieties and have often involved international co-operation. It has proven to be a lengt...

Despite a favorable business model, genomic selection is still not a popular tool for genetic improvement of Nelore cattle in Brazil mainly due to the lack of a costeffective strategy for its application. Different independent Nelore breeding programs have already developed prediction equations for usual and difficult/expensive to measure traits. Unfortunately, some programs are using genomic p...

Background: Brazil is the second country on equine embryo world production. Problems related to the application of equine embryos transfer in Brazil are discussed in this article. Review: The main factor related to low efficacy of Equine Embryos Transfer programs consists in the difficulty to induce multiple ovulations Among the most common difficulties and limitations faced in our country, we ...

4. The cross between both control lines is higher in egg production than, and similar in total egg mass and feed efficiency to, the industry L x A crosses, indicating that little or no genetic improvement has been made in these characters in some commercial breeding flocks in the past 10 years. This aspect of the above experiment in particular needs to be confirmed. If true, it will indicate an...

The Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) recently published their Individualized Quality Control Plan (IQCP [https://www.cms.gov/regulations-and-guidance/legislation/CLIA/Individualized_Quality_Control_Plan_IQCP.html]), which will be the only option for quality control (QC) starting in January 2016 if laboratories choose not to perform Clinical Laboratory Improvement Act (CLIA) [U.S....