Animal breeding - meeting the needs of our society

The livestock sector is faced with an enormous challenge to meet the aspirations of the world’s population for increased availability of high-quality animal products in a sustainable manner while ensuring food safety, animal welfare and the maintenance of rare and specialist breeds. Two recent developments will be discussed that help meet this challenge. First, the quantitative models used in animal breeding can be extended to account for interactions among individuals kept in groups. The traditional quantitative genetic theory fails to explain why some traits do not respond to selection among individuals, but respond greatly to selection among groups. When applied to data on pigs and poultry, heritable variation was significantly greater than that obtained from classical analyses. Thus, a large part of the heritable variation was hidden to classical selection due to social interactions. Second, recent research on milk quality found large genetic variation between cows in fatty acid composition and protein composition of milk. Results clearly show that it is feasible to improve the composition of milk to better meet the needs of the cheesemaking industry and of consumers. Genomics assisted breeding offers opportunities for improving composition of milk in order to make optimum use of phenotypes on detailed milk composition which are expensive to collect. Both examples demonstrate that advances in animal breeding will continue to come from combining quantitative and molecular genetics