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Showing posts from November, 2012

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Hereford and Red Angus Heifers Recruited for Genomics Research

The University of Missouri is recruiting 2,500 Hereford heifers and 2,500 Red Angus heifers to participate in a heifer puberty and fertility genomic research project. Heifers should be registered Hereford, registered Red Angus, or commercial Hereford or Red Angus. Hereford x Red Angus crossbred heifers targeted for the Premium Red Baldy Program would also be a good fit for the research project. Producers must be willing to work with a trained veterinarian to collect the following data: ReproductiveTract Scores collected at a pre-breeding exam 30 to 45 days prior to the start of the breeding season. PelvicMeasurements (height and width) collected at the same pre-breeding exam 30 to 45 days prior to the start of the breeding season. Pregnancy Determination Using Ultrasound reporting fetal age in days. Ultrasound will need to occur no later than 90 days after the start of the breeding season. In addition, heifers must have known birth dates and have weights recorded eithe

Birth Date Selection Mapping

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My advisor, Jerry Taylor, and I recently developed and published in BMC Genomics a new method to identify ongoing selection on complex or quantitative traits ( A novel analytical method, Birth Date Selection Mapping, detects response of the Angus ( Bos taurus ) genome to selection on complex traits ). Previous methods identify selection which has reached completion (or nearly reach completion) on novel mutations affecting Mendelian traits. A well known example of this type of selection is the adaptation of human populations to digest milk as adults . But, these sweeping selection events are the exception. Blue lines represent hypothetical variants that are drifting randomly through a population with an effective size of 100.  Red lines represent hypothetical variants that are under strong selection. Drifting variants are not associated with birth date. Selected variants change in frequency over time and are strong predictors of birth date. We utilize this fact to identify selected