Genomic prediction has become the new standard for genetic improvement programs, and currently, there is a desire to implement this technology for the evaluation of Angus cattle in Brazil. Thus, the main objective of this study was to assess the feasibility of evaluating young Brazilian Angus (BA) bulls and heifers for 12 routinely recorded traits using single-step genomic BLUP (ssGBLUP) with and without genotypes from American Angus (AA) sires. The second objective was to obtain estimates of effective population size (Ne) and linkage disequilibrium (LD) in the Brazilian Angus population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Cattle resistance to ticks is known to be under genetic control with a complex biological mechanism within and among breeds. Our aim was to identify genomic segments and tag single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with tick-resistance in Hereford and Braford cattle. The predictive performance of a very low-density tag SNP panel was estimated and compared with results obtained with a 50 K SNP dataset.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper presents a study on the use of low resolution infrared images to detect ticks in cattle. Emphasis is given to the main factors that influence the quality of the captured images, as well as to the actions that can increase the amount of information conveyed by these images. In addition, a new automatic method for analyzing the images and counting the ticks is introduced.
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