30 Jan New Year – New Projects
It’s a new year and even though I vowed not to get involved in any new research projects. Guess what, lots of new projects.
In the past couple of years, here has been some uptake from the purebred industry to participate in research, with Livestock Gentec at the University of Alberta. So, as the rest of the seedstock industry joins the 21st century we at Beefbooster are content to follow. As it is we have a lot of DNA information to incorporate into out Expected Breeding Values (EBV) and we are in the process of developing new EBV’s for fertility and efficiency traits to add to our economic selection index. We also plan on looking at which carcass traits to add to our index once we access carcass information from BIXS (Beef Information Exchange System).
The thing is that once you have built up a large data base of both phenotypes and genotypes, the data base begins to take on a life of its own. With the information we now have, we can participate in a number of interesting projects. Projects that are currently under the review processes, that will use Beefbooster data.
Exploiting Genetic Diversity and Heterosis
Identifying functional SNP’s to enhance prediction for RFI and carcass merit
Blood metabolites as bio-markers for RFI and carcass quality traits in beef cattle
ALMA (Alberta Livestock and Meat Agency) also put out a call for new proposals, we submitted an LOI(letter of intent) with Livestock Gentect, essentially to explore a cost effective method of measuring feed efficiency in cattle. We are looking at testing infrared technology in a feedlot environment. For more information on this technology read the two articles below.
So much for not getting involved in any new projects.
Jennifer
Identifying efficient cattle using Infrared Technology
Infrared technology provides and innovative way to help reduce cattle production costs.
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