In mammals, leptin has been demonstrated to perform important roles in many physiological activities and to influence development, growth, metabolism and reproduction. However, in fish, its function is still unclear. Duplicate leptin genes, leptin-a and leptin-b, have been identified in the orange-spotted grouper. In the present study, the polymorphisms in the leptin-b gene of the orange-spotte...

Improving feed efficiency in dairy cattle could result in more profitable and environmentally sustainable dairy production through lowering feed costs and emissions from dairy farming. In addition, beef production based on dairy herds generates fewer greenhouse gas emissions per unit of meat output than beef production from suckler cow systems. Different scenarios were used to assess the profit...

Natural genetic diversity provides a powerful tool to study the complex interrelationship between metabolism and growth. Profiling of metabolic traits combined with network-based and statistical analyses allow the comparison of conditions and identification of sets of traits that predict biomass. However, it often remains unclear why a particular set of metabolites is linked with biomass and to...

Theory and empirical evidence have long suggested that some species are extremely vulnerable to extinction because they have combinations of extinction promoting traits. However, ecologists have not considered whether the form of the relationship between traits is additive (not synergistic) or nonadditive (synergistic). We looked at how traits and their interactions were related to the differen...

Growth hormone (GH) has been considered as a candidate gene for growth traits in fish. In this study, polymorphisms of the GH gene were evaluated for associations with growth traits in 282 Siniperca chuatsi individuals. Using directly sequencing, four single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were identified in GH gene, with two mutations in intron 4 (g.4940A>C, g.4948A>T), one mutation in exon 5 ...

molecular genetics selection on individual genes is a promising method to genetically improve economically important traits in livestock. the insulin like growth factor-i (igf-i) gene may play important roles in growth of multiple tissues, including muscle cells, cartilage and bone. the objectives of the present study were the estimate the haplotype frequencies of the igf-i gene polymorphisms i...