Previous investigations suggest that male tropical birds have lower plasma testosterone concentrations than northern latitude species. To test whether this generalization is valid, we analyzed all currently available plasma testosterone data of tropical birds. We focused on peak breeding testosterone levels using phylogenetic and conventional statistics. Explanatory variables considered were so...

Improving breeding has been widely utilized in crop breeding and contributed to yield and quality improvement, yet few researches have been done to analyze genetic architecture underlying breeding improvement comprehensively. Here, we collected genotype and phenotype data of 99 cultivars from the complete pedigree including Huanghuazhan, an elite, high-quality, conventional indica rice that has...

New breeding techniques in plant agriculture exploded upon the scene about two years ago, in 2014. While these innovative plant breeding techniques, soon to be led by CRISPR/Cas9, initially appear to hold tremendous promise for plant breeding, if not a revolution for the industry, the question of how the products of these technologies will be regulated is rapidly becoming a key aspect of the te...

Theoretical rates of annual genetic responses to selection in beef cattle were compared for conventional and multiple ovulation and embryo transfer (MOET) breeding schemes. Several combinations of replacement policy, mating ratio and type of selection were considered for both schemes with low, medium and high heritabilities. For MOET, four rates of embryo transfers per donor were used to repres...

High rates of genetic gain canbe achieved through (1) accurate predictions of breedingvalues (2) high intensities of selection and (3) shorter generation intervals. Reliabilities of ~60% are currently achievable using genomic selection in dairy cattle. This breakthroughmeans that selection of animals can happen at a very early age (i.e. as soon as aDNAsample is available) and has opened opportu...

Eggplant (Solanum melongena) is related to a large number of wild species that are a source of variation for breeding programmes, in particular for traits related to adaptation to climate change. However, wild species remain largely unexploited for eggplant breeding. Detailed phenotypic characterization of wild species and their hybrids with eggplant may allow identifying promising wild species...