Service ups dairy farmers' chance of choosing the best bulls.
On 13 January, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched a service that allows dairy-cattle breeders to double their chances of selecting the best bulls to sire milk-producing cows.
"This is the future of animal breeding," says Juergen Richt, a veterinary surgeon at Kansas State University in Manhattan.
For a decade, breeders who want to locate the best bull have the animals' semen tested for its DNA, looking for traits linked to milk quality and production. About a year ago, the leading artificial-insemination organizations in the United States and Canada funded a US$1-million research project directed by Curtis Van Tassell, a geneticist at the USDA's Bovine Functional Genomics Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland. Working with Illumina Inc. of San Diego, California, Van Tassell's team created a microarray chip containing 54,000 genetic markers called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, that involve at least a dozen traits, including those known to affect milk quality and production.
Using high-throughput analysis, the researchers could then compare the DNA from a young dairy bull against the chip SNPs, telling breeders which bull would be likely to sire calves that were good milk producers. The test costs about $225, and can be done when a bull is born, thus avoiding the $25,000–50,000 cost of raising a bull for five years to see if it sires good milk-producing offspring. "The best bulls become elite breeders," says Van Tassell, "The others become hamburger."
Previously, DNA tests allowed a typical breeder to select the best bull some 35% of the time, says geneticist Ole Meland, vice-president of Accelerated Genetics in Baraboo, Wisconsin. The new technique identifies the best bull 70% of the time.
The US initiative is the first such nationwide programme. Companies in New Zealand and the Netherlands have set up private services for cattle breeders; and, following the USDA's lead, similar systems are being built by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark, and in France and Australia.
Related links
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Dalton, R. No bull: genes for better milk. Nature 457, 369 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/457369a
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/457369a
This article is cited by
-
A deterministic equation to predict the accuracy of multi-population genomic prediction with multiple genomic relationship matrices
Genetics Selection Evolution (2020)
-
Utility of whole-genome sequence data for across-breed genomic prediction
Genetics Selection Evolution (2018)
-
Genomic best linear unbiased prediction method including imprinting effects for genomic evaluation
Genetics Selection Evolution (2015)
-
Genomic Selection, a New Era for Pork Quality Improvement
Springer Science Reviews (2015)
-
Toward genomic prediction from whole-genome sequence data: impact of sequencing design on genotype imputation and accuracy of predictions
Heredity (2014)