Advances in breeding of dairy cattle

"Professor van de Werf and Dr Pryce are leading experts and have assembled an excellent team for a book describing the current state-of-the-art. This volume will contribute to the dissemination of advanced breeding technology to breeders, scientists and other stakeholders in the dairy industry. There is no doubt that it will also stimulate new developments in an exciting field of research." Prof. J. A. Lenstra, Utrecht University, The Netherlands; Editor-in-Chief of Animal Genetics This collection reviews the latest research on dairy cattle genetics and advanced methods of genetic evaluation and selection. The book first assesses the degree of inbreeding and genetic diversity in modern dairy cattle as well as opportunities for crossbreeding. It then goes onto review research on targeting non-production traits such as fertility, feed conversion efficiency and methane emissions as well as resistance to disease. The following chapters in the book then survey the latest techniques and advances in genomic selection (GS) in such areas as functional annotation and use of sequence variants to improve genomic prediction. The book also reviews developments in genetic evaluation (GE), including the use of ssGBLUP and multi-trait across-country evaluation (MACE), and the application of these techniques to breeding programmes. With its distinguished editors and impressive range of expert chapter authors, this will be a standard reference for the dairy science research community and the dairy industry. Dr Julius van der Werf is Professor of Animal Breeding and Genetics at the University of New England, Australia. He is co-Editor in Chief of the journal Genetics, Selection, Evolution and Associate Editor of the Journal of Animal Breeding and Genetics. He is also member of the College of Experts of the Australian Research Council. Dr Jennie Pryce is Principal Research Scientist at Agriculture Victoria Research part of the State Government of Victoria, Australia where she lead the Animal’s Programme of DairyBio. Dr Pryce is also Professor at La Trobe University, Australia.