Abstract
Farm animals provide about 30% of humanity’s food requirements [1]. The world’s population’s demand for animal products is expected to keep growing. New technologies in animal husbandry can make it possible to meet this demand and to reduce its impact on the environment. Genomic selection plays a key role in this process as a promising and safe method for improving genetic qualities of farm animals. Before the widespread of genomic selection, high cost of genotyping was the main factor holding back an improvement of animal farming. However, today, the bottleneck in genomic selection is a limited amount of high-quality phenotypic data, which is still either difficult or too costly to obtain [2]. New technologies in animal phenotyping become of special attention. The current paper reviews the next-generation technologies in animal phenotyping and revels the main challenges limiting its widespread in the example of dairy cattle.
Highlights
Herd books and manual performance records were the principal tool in breeding programs in pre-genomic era
Manual assessment and entry of phenotypic data tends to be replaced by automated recording with radio sensors and systems for collection and analysis of biological samples making it possible an automized recording of productivity, feed conversion, health, fertility, pregnancy, calving ease, temperature adaption, potential impact on climate and even of indicators of an experienced stress [3]. This information is subsequently used to reveal possible relationships between genomic data and phenotypic traits in order to improve the accuracy of genomic-estimated breeding values
Since the late 1970s, the Somatic Cell Count (SCC) in milk samples was the main indicator of mastitis
Summary
Herd books and manual performance records were the principal tool in breeding programs in pre-genomic era. Manual assessment and entry of phenotypic data tends to be replaced by automated recording with radio sensors and systems for collection and analysis of biological samples making it possible an automized recording of productivity, feed conversion, health, fertility, pregnancy, calving ease, temperature adaption, potential impact on climate and even of indicators of an experienced stress [3] This information is subsequently used to reveal possible relationships between genomic data and phenotypic traits in order to improve the accuracy of genomic-estimated breeding values. The new sensors are recording health indicators (lameness, disease symptoms), animal welfare and their productivity (fat, protein, lactose, urea nitrogen in milk) and environmental data (feed composition, temperature) in real time [5] The phenotype database plays a special role in determining the economic indicators of the value of an animal
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