BACKGROUND AND AIMS Floral rewards may be associated with certain morphological floral traits and thus act as underlying factors promoting selection on these traits. This study investigates whether some traits that are under pollinator-mediated selection (flower number, stalk height, corolla diameter, corolla tube length and corolla tube width) in the Mediterranean herb E. mediohispanicum (Bras...

The EU Commission issued a regulation in 2003, which requires all member states to implement a breeding programme for resistance to transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in sheep by selecting for specific alleles of the prion protein (PrP) gene. A key concern with regard to this regulation was that the intensive selection programmes, designed to increase resistance to scrapie, may have a ne...

Phenotypic and genetic correlations were estimated between 48 type appraisal traits and first lactation milk production to determine the importance of appraisal traits in a breeding program from 5,024 records from the New York type appraisal program. Most phenotypic correlations amgng the type traits were near zero. Depth of udder was the appraisal trait having the highest correlation with firs...

Several personality/temperament traits have been linked to health outcomes in humans and animals but underlying physiological mechanisms for these differential outcomes are minimally understood. In this paper, we compared the strength of a behavioral trait (behavioral inhibition) and an associated physiological trait (glucocorticoid production) in predicting life span. In addition, we examined ...

Leptin and leptin receptor genes are considered as production traits markers in dairy or beef cattle. The aim of this study was to verify the associations of polymorphisms in bovine LEP and LEPR genes with production and reproduction traits in Slovak Spotted and Pinzgau cows. Long-life production was evaluated: milk, protein, and fat yield and reproduction traits: age at first calving, calving ...

This study provides estimates of genetic parameters for various diseases, fertility and 305-day milk production traits in dairy cattle using data from a UK national milk recording scheme. The data set consisted of 63891 multiple lactation records on diseases (mastitis, lameness, milk fever, ketosis and tetany), fertility traits (calving interval, conception to first service, number of services ...

Inbreeding results from the mating of related individuals and is becoming increasingly important in domestic livestock populations. Inbreeding depression is the reduction of the mean phenotypic value, particularly for traits connected with reproduction or fitness (Miglior et al., 1992). Inbreeding depression has been shown to decrease milk production by approximately 9-26 kg of milk per lactati...

the aim of this study was to estimate genetic parameters of age at first calving and its relationship with productive traits of holstein dairy cows. a total of 24491 first lactation records (2x 305d) which were collected from 1995 to 2009 were used. the general linear model (glm) procedure was applied to determine effective factors on studied traits. herd-year-season (hys) and age at first calv...

Wood represents a promising source of lignocellulosic biomass for the production of bio-based renewables, especially biofuels. However, woody feedstocks must be improved to become competitive against petroleum. We created a collection of Populus trees consisting of 40 genetically engineered lines to modify and to better understand wood biomass properties. A total of 65 traits were measured in t...

BACKGROUND Growth and meat production traits are significant economic traits in sheep. The aim of the study is to identify candidate genes affecting growth and meat production traits at genome level with high throughput single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) genotyping technologies. METHODOLOGY AND RESULTS Using Illumina OvineSNP50 BeadChip, we performed a GWA study in 329 purebred sheep for 1...