Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The advent of the BovineSNP50 BeadChip (with approximately 55,000 Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms, SNP), has enabled both genome wide selection and genome wide association analysis for traits routinely recorded in the dairy industry. The former offers the possibility of increasing rates of improvement by 50%, the sort of increase that will be required if we are to be able to help feed a population of 9 billion people expected by 2050. Although this is a very exciting development more is potentially possible. This new project will develop the next generation selection tools for the Canadian dairy industry. Specifically it will take the results from the application of this state-of-the-art technology (developed in 2007/8) and seek to find the genes and mutations that explain these results. By doing so the project aims to identify many of the genes and polymorphisms causally explaining variation in these traits. This step will benefit both Semex and the Canadian Dairy industry overall through another increase in the rate of genetic improvement and also extend this technology to both the male and female herds (as currently application is essentially limited to selecting better bulls).