Genetics and Breeding of Ruminant

Dear Colleagues,

Animal breeding exploits natural genetic variation between individuals to increase traits of economic value, such as productivity. At the beginning of this century, breeding programs mostly relied on marker-assisted selection in young males based on some genetic markers and pedigree information. This strategy overcame the limitation of traditional progeny test programs, which required years for the first data on the sire’s daughters to be available. Then, thanks to the introduction of high-density SNP chips and the progressive decrease in genotyping costs, the number of genotyped individuals started to increase, providing new data for computing genomic evaluations. The implementation of genomic selection in the breeding programs of many countries had introduced significant advances in the selection of ruminants, increasing rates of genetic gain. This revolution has led to the need for storing an extensive amount of genomic data, as well as the development of sophisticated tools of analysis. However, further knowledge needs to be acquired about the genetic architecture of quantitative variation. In addition, a future challenge will be inclusion in the selection goals of novel traits for improving health, reproduction, longevity and sustainability of production. The broad scientific interest into the breeding of ruminant species prompted us to open a Special Issue on this topic, which will cover all aspects of ruminants’ genetics and genomics, including studies on genetics of complex and/or novel traits, genomic technologies, and statistical approaches for genomic data analysis (e.g., machine learning).

Dr. Tania Bobbo
Dr. Giulietta Minozzi
Dr. Giulio Visentin
Guest Editors

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• ruminants
• genetics
• genomic technologies
• high-throughput phenotypes
• molecular markers
• breeding
• diversity
• machine learning