Journal article
The genetic architecture of climatic adaptation of tropical cattle
LR Porto-Neto, A Reverter, KC Prayaga, EKF Chan, DJ Johnston, RJ Hawken, G Fordyce, JF Garcia, TS Sonstegard, S Bolormaa, ME Goddard, HM Burrow, JM Henshall, SA Lehnert, W Barendse
Plos One | Published : 2014
Abstract
Adaptation of global food systems to climate change is essential to feed the world. Tropical cattle production, a mainstay of profitability for farmers in the developing world, is dominated by heat, lack of water, poor quality feedstuffs, parasites, and tropical diseases. In these systems European cattle suffer significant stock loss, and the cross breeding of taurine x indicine cattle is unpredictable due to the dilution of adaptation to heat and tropical diseases. We explored the genetic architecture of ten traits of tropical cattle production using genome wide association studies of 4,662 animals varying from 0% to 100% indicine. We show that nine of the ten have genetic architectures tha..
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Funding Acknowledgements
The data collection was funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for Beef Genetic Technologies, the Cooperative Research Centre for Cattle and Beef Quality and their core partners. The Cooperative Research Centres have closed and funding for the analysis and write-up has come from non-specific funding from CSIRO through its Food Futures Flagship. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.