0 avis
New breeding goals and role of genomics on adaptation and resilience traits in French dairy sheep
Archive ouverte
Edité par CCSD ; Wageningen Academic Publishers -
International audience. For several decades, the breeding organizations ruling the French dairy sheep breeds have developed efficient breeding programs aiming at improving the local breeds in their production area and system. This has led to an annual genetic gain ranging between 0.15 and 0.22 standard deviation unit, depending on the breed. The breeding programs have steadily included new selection criteria in addition to milk yield: milk quality, resistance to mastitis, udder morphology, scrapie resistance. Following the development and spread of genomic selection (GS) in dairy cattle in the early 2010, different research × development programs have assessed the feasibility of GS in dairy sheep: reference populations in each breed, genomic evaluation to improve GEBVs’ accuracy, conception, modelling and optimization of dairy-sheep-customized genomic breeding schemes. These achievements have resulted in the switch towards GS in 2015 in the Lacaune breed and in 2017 in the Pyrenean and Corsican breeds. This new era of GS has opened the way to great expectations. The increasing efficiency of the programs, even though not as dramatic as promised in cattle (20% additional genetic gain observed in the Lacaune breed 3 years after the starting point of GS) will make easier the inclusion of new traits in the upcoming years. In a context of feed resources autonomy and adaptation to climate changes, news traits will be related to: health resistance and resilience traits such as resistance to internal parasites, adaptation and rusticity traits such as longevity and lactation persistency, functional morphology such as feet and legs traits, feed efficiency, reproduction traits such as semen production, predicted milk fatty acid and protein composition allowed by MIR spectrometry, The breeding goals of the near future will aim at being more balanced and at improving both sustainability and cost-effectiveness of a dairy sheep production anchored in its production system and producing high quality PDO cheese. Finally, both genomic tools and balanced breeding goals will help to maintain the existing biodiversity by better managing the genetic variability of the breeds.
Consulter en ligne
Suggestions
Du même auteur
