Effect of inclusion or non-inclusion of short lactations and cow and/or dam genetic group on genetic evaluation of Girolando dairy cattle

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of inclusion or non-inclusion of short lactations and cow (CGG) and/or dam (DGG) genetic group on the genetic evaluation of 305-day milk yield (MY305), age at first calving (AFC), and first calving interval (FCI) of Girolando cows. Covariance components were estimated by the restricted maximum likelihood method in an animal model of single trait analyses. The heritability estimates for MY305, AFC, and FCI ranged from 0.23 to 0.29, 0.40 to 0.44, and 0.13 to 0.14, respectively, when short lactations were not included, and from 0.23 to 0.28, 0.39 to 0.43, and 0.13 to 0.14, respectively, when short lactations were included. The inclusion of short lactations caused little variation in the variance components and heritability estimates of traits, but their non-inclusion resulted in the re-ranking of animals. Models with CGG or DGG fixed effects had higher heritability estimates for all traits compared with models that consider these two effects simultaneously. We recommend using the model with fixed effects of CGG and inclusion of short lactations for the genetic evaluation of Girolando cattle

Single Nucleotide Variants And Indels Identified From Whole-genome Re-sequencing Of Guzerat, Gyr, Girolando And Holstein Cattle Breeds

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)Whole-genome re-sequencing, alignment and annotation analyses were undertaken for 12 sires representing four important cattle breeds in Brazil: Guzerat (multi-purpose), Gyr, Girolando and Holstein (dairy production). A total of approximately 4.3 billion reads from an Illumina HiSeq 2000 sequencer generated for each animal 10.7 to 16.4-fold genome coverage. A total of 27,441,279 single nucleotide variations (SNVs) and 3,828,041 insertions/deletions (InDels) were detected in the samples, of which 2,557,670 SNVs and 883,219 InDels were novel. The submission of these genetic variants to the dbSNP database significantly increased the number of known variants, particularly for the indicine genome. The concordance rate between genotypes obtained using the Bovine HD BeadChip array and the same variants identified by sequencing was about 99.05%. The annotation of variants identified numerous non-synonymous SNVs and frameshift InDels which could affect phenotypic variation. Functional enrichment analysis was performed and revealed that variants in the olfactory transduction pathway was over represented in all four cattle breeds, while the ECM-receptor interaction pathway was over represented in Girolando and Guzerat breeds, the ABC transporters pathway was over represented only in Holstein breed, and the metabolic pathways was over represented only in Gyr breed. The genetic variants discovered here provide a rich resource to help identify potential genomic markers and their associated molecular mechanisms that impact economically important traits for Gyr, Girolando, Guzerat and Holstein breeding programs. © 2017 Stafuzza et al.This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.123Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e TecnológicoCAPES, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível SuperiorFAPEMIG, Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas GeraisConselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES