If you are interested in any of the following topics or if you have questions, please contact Peter von Rohr (Qualitas AG) Chamerstrasse 56, 6300 Zug; peter.vonrohr@qualitasag.ch, Tel 041 768 92 21.
Routinely, selection candidates are genotyped with a Low-density chip (LD-chip, about 30000 SNPs). The prediction of SNP-effects in a training population is done with sires genotyped with a chip with a higher density. As a consequence of that sires which are selected for artificial insemination are usually re-genotyped. In populations like Original Braunvieh and Simmental the amount of natural insemination is high. In breeding schemes without artificial insemination, selected sires are not re-genotyped with the denser chip. The influence of this fact on the accuracy of the predicted genomic breeding values in the population of Original Braunvieh is to be investigated with a real-world dataset. The project contains imputation of the LD-Chip genotypes onto the denser chip by predicting the missing genotypes and the prediction of genomic breeding values
Swiss Dairy Cattle breeding organisations have traditionally been collecting the same type of data from a large number of farms. Recently the breeding organisations have diversified their services and now offer different type of memberships. Depending on the type of membership that a farmer is committing to different types of data are collected. Some of these newly collected data offer the possibility to use the information from this data as selection tools. To the best of our knowledge there has not been any scientific investigation about the benefits of collecting the new types of data for the breeding program as a whole.
SESAM stands for Sensor Assisted Alpine Milk Production and is an Interreg B project in the EU. The project aims at predicting new phenotypes based on sensor-collected activity patterns of cows. In a first project stage, behavior phenotypes must be derived from activity patterns and activity data. The main task in this project is to determine the different behavior traits based on collected video data.
In populations with a low rate of artificial insemination, it is often a problem that effects of herds cannot be compared or estimated. There are different measures that indicate such problems. These measures are all contained in the general concept of connectedness.
More than 100 farms with robotic milking systems are connected to the service of automated data exchange. For those farms, the milk yield per cow is collected on a daily basis. This allows to describe the trajectory of the trait milk yield over time with much more accuracy. This new type of automated data collection is expected to deliver a lot more information about different traits of a cow that are related to health and resilience. This project aims at discovering such new traits which can ultimately be used as new traits for selection in dairy populations.
Fertalys is a pregnancy testing service offered by the Swiss Dairy Cattle Breeding Organisations together with Swisslab. Results from Fertalys tests might contain information about different relevant fertility traits. The goals of this project is to find possible connections between test results and other traits.
An analysis comparable to https://doi.org/10.3168/jds.2018-15858 is to be developed.
Early maturity is an important trait in beef cattle. But this trait is not easy to integrate into a breeding program. Different solutions to this problem should be proposed and evaluated.
Based on the results of a previous master thesis, different comparison studies should be undertaken where conventional linear mixed models are compared with the generalized linear mixed model based on the same data set.
Some beef cattle breeds (Charolais, Limousin, …) are looking into the genetic basis of the myostatin-gene (double-muscle). Recent developments in genomic selection of beef cattle in Switzerland give the possibility to analyse the status of the myostatin-gene in the Swiss beef cattle breeds. A specific emphasis is to be put to the relationship with other important characteristics of the animals such as calving traits.
If you are interested in any of the following topics or if you have questions, please contact Peter von Rohr (Qualitas AG) Chamerstrasse 56, 6300 Zug; peter.vonrohr@qualitasag.ch, Tel 041 768 92 21.
Latest Changes: 2021-02-19 09:11:52 (peter)