Moo-ving Forward: How BioVenic’s High-Tech Solutions Are Transforming Dairy Farming

Although traditional breeding methods are effective in the selection of animal populations with many important economic traits, the accuracy of breeding values has always been a problem with these methods. With the rapid development of molecular genetics, modern biotechnologies, and bioinformatics and their penetration and application in animal breeding, genome selection technology has become a research hotspot and frontier in the field of animal breeding to make greater genetic progress. Genome selection has become the future of livestock breeding companies by reducing genetic spacing and improving reliability to increase genetic gain. Different Selection Strategies in Animal BreedingPhenotypic Selection in Animal BreedingTraditionally, animals were selected for reproduction based on phenotypic records. Phenotypic selection is the simple way of improving animal traits. However, it is difficult to measure and profile the actual improvement of traits, such as those that are late expressed, sex restricted, or low heritability. In addition, this breeding process is relatively slow, because it takes a long time to collect enough sub-representative types for high-precision genetic evaluation, and the accuracy is also limited by environmental impact.Marker-assisted Selection in Animal BreedingUsing genomic information to improve reliability is called marker-assisted selection (MAS). MAS depends on identifying the association between genetic markers and linked quantitative trait loci (QTLs), as well as the association between markers. Compared with phenotypic selection, MAS is beneficial to sex restricted traits, traits with poor reproductive value prediction and late expression traits. Although MAS technology has improved reliability, it is not timely in animal breeding plans, because its limited markers can only capture simple and limited traits.Genomic Selection in Animal BreedingGenomic selection (GS) can be seen as an extension of marker-assisted selection (MAS), both of which use marker information for assisted selection, but MAS only uses a small number of markers, while genomic selection uses markers covering the entire genome, so it can capture all genetic information. Without any knowledge of the marker genes, genomic selection can be performed by estimating all marker effects, indirectly estimating the effects of all genes, and summing all marker effect estimates instead of estimated breeding values. Therefore, the advantages of genome selection include but are not limited to,More accurate.Shorter generation intervals.Capture all genetic information to facilitate the selection of complex traits.