The genetic architecture of climatic adaptation of tropical cattle.

Adaptation of global food systems to climate change is essential to feed the world. Tropical cattle production, a mainstay of profitability for farmers in the developing world, is dominated by heat, lack of water, poor quality feedstuffs, parasites, and tropical diseases. In these systems European cattle suffer significant stock loss, and the cross breeding of taurine x indicine cattle is unpredictable due to the dilution of adaptation to heat and tropical diseases.

Fine-mapping the POLL locus in Brahman cattle yields the diagnostic marker CSAFG29.

The POLL locus has been mapped to the centromeric region of bovine chromosome 1 (BTA1) in both taurine breeds and taurine-indicine crosses in an interval of approximately 1 Mb. It has not yet been mapped in pure-bred zebu cattle. Despite several efforts, neither causative mutations in candidate genes nor a singular diagnostic DNA marker has been identified.

Association weight matrix for the genetic dissection of puberty in beef cattle.

We describe a systems biology approach for the genetic dissection of complex traits based on applying gene network theory to the results from genome-wide associations. The associations of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) that were individually associated with a primary phenotype of interest, age at puberty in our study, were explored across 22 related traits. Genomic regions were surveyed for genes harboring the selected SNP.

Haplotypes that include the integrin alpha 11 gene are associated with tick burden in cattle.

Background: Infestations on cattle by the ectoparasite Boophilus (Rhipicephalus) microplus (cattle tick) impact negatively on animal production systems. Host resistance to tick infestation has a low to moderate heritability in the range 0.13 - 0.