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Showing posts from December, 2022

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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
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Hair Shedding Research Available

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 Happy to submit our Hair Shedding manuscript for publication. Preprint is available at bioRxiv   https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.12.14.520472   This is an exciting manuscript. It represents the work of many collaborators, especially farmers and ranchers. I made a lot of great friends through this project. The science is exciting. The large, multi-breed sample size worked well to identify associations and genetic interactions with hair shedding. We were also able to make accurate genomic predictions of hair shedding for multiple breeds. I also think hair shedding scores are a valuable management tool. Cows who shed late tend to have poorer nutrition or are stressed in some way.  Data has been submitted to Dryad and should be publicly available soon. Data is not published yet, but in a few weeks it will appear at this address:  https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ngf1vhhz4   Harly Durbin Rowan deserves the lion's share of the credit for managing this project, working with farmers and rancher
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What the genetics of feral cats tell us about domestication and human history

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  Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons The journal Heredity  did a nice podcast with Sara Nilson, Leslie Lyons and me on our recent cat paper.  Listen here:  https://nature.com/hdy/podcast https://shows.acast.com/heredity-podcast-naturecom-science-feeds/episodes/the-cradle-of-cat-domestication Link to the paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41437-022-00568-4 Nilson, S.M., Gandolfi, B., Grahn, R.A.  et al.  Genetics of randomly bred cats support the cradle of cat domestication being in the Near East.  Heredity   129 , 346–355 (2022).
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