Myostatin or growth and differentiation factor 8 (GDF8), has been known as the factor causing double muscling phenotypes in which a series of mutations make the myostatin protein inactive, hence disabling it to regulate the deposition of muscle fibre. This phenotype happens with high frequency in a breed of sheep known as the Texel. Quantitative trait loci (QTL) studies show that a portion of t...

Implementation of genomic selection in sheep breeding provides a number of challenges, compared to dairy cattle, because of the higher genetic diversity between and within sheep breeds, the cost of maintaining reference populations and the limited ability of individual breeders to invest in genotyping. Within this study, we compare theoretical and realized genomic prediction accuracies for trai...

myostatin or growth and differentiation factor 8 (gdf8), has been known as the factor causing double muscling phenotypes in which a series of mutations make the myostatin protein inactive, hence disabling it to regulate the deposition of muscle fibre. this phenotype happens with high frequency in a breed of sheep known as the texel. quantitative trait loci (qtl) studies show that a portion of t...

The present study aimed to estimate heritability, genetic and phenotypic correlations between body weight and body measurement traits in Iranian Makuei sheep. The used data were collected from 1989 to 2012 at Makuei Sheep Breeding Station in Maku (West Azarbayjan province). The data included body weight and five body measurement traits (body length (BL), heart girth (HG), withers height (WH), r...

Wool and meat contribute to profit in sheep enterprises and both need to be considered in breeding programs. The relative responses expected from selection for a range of traits are presented and the realised responses that have been achieved in Merinos and variation in maternal breeds are illustrated. Knowledge of genetic parameters is required for the development of complex breeding objective...

BACKGROUND Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE) are fatal neurodegenerative diseases of several mammalian species, including humans. In Italy, the active surveillance through rapid tests on brain stem from small ruminants started in 2002 on randomly selected samples of healthy slaughtered animals. Sampling number was proportionally related to the regional small ruminant population. O...

Knowledge about genetic markers linked to genes affecting quantitative traits can increase the selection response of animal breeding programs, especially for traits that are difficult to improve when using traditional selection (Meuwissen and Goddard, 1996; Meuwissen and Van Arendonk, 1992). The seasonal breeding pattern that is commonly observed in temperate sheep breeds is a major obstacle to...

Plasma membrane H+-ATPase is a major integral membrane protein with a role in various physiological processes including abiotic stress response. To study the effect of NaCl on the expression pattern of a gene encoding the plasma membrane H+-ATPase, an experiment was carried out in a completely random design with three replications. A pair of specific primers was designed based on the sequence o...

With climate change bound to affect food and feed production, emphasis will shift resilient adapted indigenous livestock sustain animal production. However, comprise several varieties, strains ecotypes whose genomes are poorly characterized. Here, we investigated genomic variation in an African thin-tailed Desert Sheep sampled Sudan, using 600K genotype data generated from 92 individuals repres...