Seasonal weight loss in dairy goats from the Canary Islands: towards an integrated omics approach?

Abstract

Seasonal weight loss (SWL) is very important for animal production in the Tropics and the Mediterranean. These environments are characterized by two seasons: rainy with abundant pastures, and dry, with poor pastures where animals may lose up to 30 % of their live weight with severe consequences for production performances. Therefore, SWL is the major constraint to animal production in tropical regions, which emphasizes the need to improve our knowledge in SWL and possible solutions to overcome it (Cardoso and Almeida, 2013). Presently, about half of world’s sheep and goats live in the tropical regions and, additionally, the dairy industry importance has increased significantly. Therefore, it is a main concern to determine solutions for SWL, particularly as the costs associated to supplementation are particularly high (Cardoso and Almeida, 2013). The identification of markers of tolerance to SWL susceptible of being used in animal selection is considered to be of major significance to increase stock productivity (Eckersall et al., 2012). In this work, we used two different goat breeds from the Canary Islands (Spain) with contrasting levels of adaptation to SWL: Majorera (adapted to nutritional stress) and the Palmera breed (susceptible to subnutrition). Both breeds have common ancestors (Amills et al., 2004), that may serve as a model for other goat breeds. The ultimate objective of this work is to identify biomarkers of tolerance to weight loss, using proteomics and transcriptomics studies that may provide information regarding different goats’ breeds’ tolerance to SWL.KeywordsWheat StrawLive WeightAnimal ProductionMilk YieldCanary IslandThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.