A Steak in Genomics™

 Jamie Courter and Jared Decker had the opportunity to present a webinar on hair shedding with the American Angus Association. Watch below! Didn't get your question answered? Be sure to check out our presentation at the Beef Improvement Federation Symposium on June 11th, 2024 at 3 pm. 

The tool is part of a study published in an Oxford University Press journal and could be used to help cattle farmers improve the health, well-being and productivity of their herds.   A groundbreaking, newly-published study by CAFNR researcher Jared Decker uses genomics and citizen science to help cattle farmers and ranchers across the globe make better breeding selections that will ultimately improve sustainability, animal welfare and profitability of their operations. And, the key to all of this? Hair shedding. “This project has been really exciting to me because it blends both very basic research all the way to very applied research, so it is one of those rare projects that covers that wide spectrum,” said Jared Decker, associate professor of animal sciences and Wurdack Chair of Animal Genomics. According to Decker, some cows shed their winter hair more effectively than others. This means that some lose their heavy winter coats during the spring months before the heat of summer s...

 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...

Decker explains the importance of utilizing hair shedding EPDs to increase animal adaptability. “Hair shedding is linked to milk production, reproduction and possibly animal welfare. Hair shedding is easy to collect and predict so it may play a role in selecting genetics with an improved adaptability to heat stresses,” said Jared Decker, University of Missouri associate professor. He gave his presentation “A Piece of the Adaptability Puzzle: Multi-breed Hair Shedding Genetic Effects and EPD” during the Beef Improvement Federation (BIF) Symposium June 23 in Des Moines, Iowa. Cow efficiency and adaptability is a multi-pronged and complicated puzzle. Researchers have pursued the identification of local adaptation and region-specific genomic predictions in beef cattle using hair shedding scores as an indicator of tolerance to heat stress. Hair shedding scores measure how early the winter hair is shed off in the spring and summer. Cattle tend to shed their winter hair from front to back an...

 You can visit the Brangus Journal to read an article Harly Durbin and Jared Decker wrote about hair shedding scores in Brangus cattle.  https://issuu.com/gobrangus/docs/2021_april_brangus_journal-compressed_2/26

 On December 3rd, Harly Durbin, a PhD student in my group, successfully defended her PhD dissertation. You can watch a video of her public seminar, in which she discusses hair shedding and genotype-by-environment interactions for growth.  Congratulations Harly!

  It has been a very busy fall for the Decker Computational Genomics Group ! This will be capped off by two PhD defenses the first week of December.  “Leveraging Large-scale Beef Cattle Genomic Data to Identify the Architecture of Polygenic Selection  and Local Adaptation” Presented by: Troy Rowan December 1st, 2020 at 1 pm CST Seminar will be presented on Zoom . In January, Troy will be starting as an assistant professor with a focus on beef genomics research and extension at University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture.  "Genomics of Seasonal Hair Shedding and Ecoregion-Specific Growth to Identify Environmentally-Adapted Beef Cattle" Presented by: Harly Durbin December 3rd, 2020 at 12 pm CST Seminar will be presented on Zoom .  In January, Harly will be continuing in my group as a postdoctoral researcher. We appreciate all of the support and collaboration from the beef industry that has made this research possible. Further, research would not have been pos...

One of the things I learned from my student Troy Rowan was that best part of breed association's junior national expos is the contests and activities.  So, when I saw the Junior National Hereford Expo Pee Wee Speech contest was online this year, we jumped at the opportunity.  Below is Jensen Decker's speech titled "Hazardous Hair Shedding".    Really excited about the growth this young man showed through this experience! Thanks for to the National Hereford Women for sponsoring the Pee Wee Speech contest.

Figure 1 from Durbin et al. 2020. We recently posted a preprint (a research publication that has not yet been peer reviewed) to the bioRxiv server. You can read the article here:  https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.21.109553   *Update: Peer-reviewed, published paper is available open-access here:  https://gsejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12711-020-00584-0  "Development of a genetic evaluation for hair shedding in American Angus cattle to improve thermotolerance" This manuscript describes our work with Angus breeders and Angus Genetics Inc. to create a hair shedding EPD for the American Angus Association. We learned a lot of cool things about hair shedding in this paper. Including how hair shedding is related to other traits and how hair shedding is related to the environment. 1) Negative Relationship Between Milk and Growth Something interesting to me was to learn more about the genetic correlation between weaning weight direct and weaning weight maternal...

We will have a scientific article describing the hair shedding research soon. Work was completed by Harly Durbin during her time at Angus Genetics Inc. as an intern.

My group has posted a new preprint on bioRxiv .  You can check it out here:  https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.11.988121 Warning, it is written for a technical audience, not in cowboy terms. So- what are the take-home messages for farmers and ranchers? We can identify the DNA variants responding to your selection decisions. You tend to select cattle that have better immune systems. Hormone production in the ovaries is under selection in Red Angus. Makes sense based on the breed's focus on fertility. Muscle development is under selection in Gelbvieh.  We can identify the DNA variants that lead to cattle adapted to their environment Blood vessel tightening or loosening is under environmental selection. The brain and neuron signaling is an important part of environmental adaptation. We are losing local adaptation in beef cattle. Check out this Twitter thread to see figures from the paper. https://twitter.com/pop_gen_JED/status/1258786262149808131 Regarding the last point, we c...

Head over to the January 2020 issue of the ANGUS BEEF BULLETIN to read a new article written by my graduate student Harly Durbin and me. Harly was an intern at Angus Genetics Inc. the summer of 2019, and through her work AGI will be releasing a Hair Shedding EPD in 2020. Article Available Here .

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Julie Harker of Brownfield Ag News. Head over to Brownfield Ag News to listen to our conversation. At Mizzou, we are working to create new tools that will stack the deck for farmers and ranchers to be more sustainable. That sustainability includes environmental stewardship, social responsibility, and, perhaps most importantly, profitability. Thanks to Julie for taking time to conduct the interview and publish it!

The Thompson Research Field Day will be Thursday, September 21, 2017. This year we will be having an evening program, hopefully to better accommodate more people's schedules. See the flyer below for program details. Dinner will be provided.

It is the time of year to once again record and report hair shedding scores. This fact sheet on eBEEF.org should come in handy. Participants in our hair shedding genomic research project should have received an email from Harly Durbin. This email contained an Excel file to report hair shedding scores on enrolled cattle. If not, please get in touch with us as soon as possible. We must receive 2017 data in these Excel files! It is important that we receive data on our target goal of 8,000 cattle. If your cattle are enrolled in the research program, we should have received DNA cards and 2016 data from you by now. If we have not yet received your data, you are in danger of being removed from the program. If we have not received your data, please get in touch with Harly and I by email or by phone . We know receiving genomic-enhanced EPDs is very important to hair shedding study participants. This is also a priority to us. We have worked with breed associations and GeneSeek to m...