Recipient Organization
COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY
(N/A)
FORT COLLINS,CO 80523
Performing Department
Animal Science
Non Technical Summary
Beef production continues to play a critical role in the US economy and in meeting the food needs of consumers. Producers of beef constantly strive to meet consumer demands for a quality product raised in a sustainable system under a variety of natural environments while maintaining the economic viability of their own operations--a challenging task. Selecting breeding animals with superior genetics that produce progeny more adapted to their environments, yet that also produce a wholesome, healthy, quality beef for the consumer is critical to sustainability. To achieve this goal, producers rely on selection tools to help them identify the genetically superior animals to produce the next generation of animals and to drive genetic improvement throughout the beef industry.The overarching goal of this project is to provide the beef industry with an improved set of tools that enable the selection of genetically superior livestock and ultimately improve animal welfare, customer/consumer satisfaction, and profitability of beef production. These tools, known as expected progeny differences (EPD), are based on animal pedigree and performance measures and recently, include genomic information for some traits. These EPD provide the most accurate mode of selection to date and are routinely used throughout the industry. Selection of breeding animals at the seedstock sector ultimately influences animal production throughout the industry via genetic improvement and therefore accurate selection is critical for industry success.This project is designed to improve the EPD for traits that directly influence product costs and revenues and consumer preferences thereby resulting in quicker improvement of the national beef herd, in turn, meeting consumer demands more quickly--traits such as carcass weight (determine the amount of saleable meat from each carcass), susceptibility to disease, feed efficiency, and longevity are a few of those to be addressed in this project. Yet genetic improvement in these traits would improve beef production efficiency, producing beef with fewer natural resources; improve animal welfare and result in ahealthful, quality product for the consumer.Of special focus of this project is the development of methodologies and databases to better leverage animal data, collected by breeders and scientists both in the seedstock and commercial sectors of the industry. The ability to use data from crossbred populations and to further leverage the results of genomic tests to improve accuracy of selection is also of new and critical importance. Genomic tests allow breeders to use a DNA (e.g., hair) sample to identify animals carrying genes resulting in superior performance and then to use those animals in designed breeding programs. Yet the results of these tests need to be incorporated into the calculation and delivery of EPD commonly used by the industry. The blending of these technologies keeps the tools simple for choosing bulls and replacement heifers. This project's objectives include development of EPD methodologies and delivery of tools to industry professionals for their immediate use.
Animal Health Component
35%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
30%
Applied
35%
Developmental
35%
Goals / Objectives
Goal: The overarching goal of this project is to provide the beef industry with an improved set of tools that enable the selection of genetically superior livestock and ultimately improve animal health, welfare, customer/consumer satisfaction, and profitability of beef production. The tools delivered will be expected progeny differences (EPD) with improved accuracy and for traits for which previous EPD were not available. These new EPD will more directly relate to costs and revenues of production in an ever-changing beef production environment. The primary results will be disseminated to the industry via beef breed associations and producer groups.The objectives of this project are to:Identify economically relevant traits (ERT) which represent either revenue or cost streams in all sectors of the beef industry,Develop new genetic evaluation and selection tools for these ERT in the form of expected progeny differences (EPD) and EPD indexes,Develop computational methods for national cattle evaluation both for purebred and crossbred databases,Perform routine genetic evaluations for beef breed associations and other producer groups,Develop databases to store and methodologies to incorporate genomic data for use in national cattle evaluation, andSupport a list server for animal breeding and genetics professionalsDisseminate research results at beef industry professional meetings and production locations and guidance on the appropriate use of EPD and economic selection indexes.
Project Methods
Economically relevant traits (ERT) for the various sectors of the beef industry continue to be identified as new technology becomes available and as new markets emerge. As the industry changes to meet market and consumer demands, the list of ERT in beef production will need to be modified. Advances in technology now enable use of both phenotypic and genotypic information to calculate EPD. In addition, more direct measurement of traditionally difficult phenotypes such as individual feed intake and susceptibility to respiratory disease has been increasing. Industry databases are growing with respect to novel ERT such as these, and we will continue to utilize these resources for development and implementation of genetic evaluation and improvement programs for economically relevant traits in the beef industry. However, industry databases take time to grow and now many animals in these databases also have genomic information. In the meantime, we are building and have built research datasets to perform the foundational research necessary for delivery of EPD for these ERT to the industry--especially for health, adaptability, female longevity, female reproduction, and feed utilization traits. At the John E. Rouse Beef Improvement Center, we continue to amass female longevity, reproduction, and pulmonary hypertension observations for use in these studies. Similarly, data being collected at the CSU Feed Intake Unit, where a database of feed intake information on over 4000 animals has already been collected and continues to grow has been and will be used for future studies evaluating measures of feedlot performance and other ERT in other sectors of the beef industry. Development of EPD for new ERT will follow a path similar to the development of EPD already delivered to the industry. The process (for objectives 1 through 4) basically includes:Identify the economically relevant traits leveraging the input of our current CGEL cooperators representing a majority of seedstock breeders in the US.Collect sufficient research data to quantify the amount of genetic control of that trait and identify correlated traits as indicators, leveraging data currently being collected at the CSU-Beef Improvement Center, the ARDEC Feed intake unit, Eastern Colorado Research Center, and industry-collected data.If there is sufficient genetic variation, calculate prototype EPD.Determine the feasibility of collecting field data from producers to use in the calculation of the EPD. If this is cost or logistically prohibitive, identify the indicator traits with the highest likelihood of successful field data collection and that will increase accuracy of EPD.Using the field data from industry, calculate and deliver the expected progeny difference for use by the industry.In this project, emphasis will be placed primarily on traits associated with the cost of beef production such as feed intake (and alternative measures of feed utilization), as well as health and adaptability traits such as grazing distribution, susceptibility to bovine respiratory disease, adaptability to high altitude, and susceptibility to feedlot heart failure.Other new technology, in the form of molecular breeding values based on high-density single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotypes, are also becoming more readily available. This project will investigate methodologies to incorporate these molecular evaluation tools into existing and new national cattle evaluation systems and include identification of SNP associated with performance measures. Incorporation of genomic information into genetic evaluation has the potential to increase accuracy, especially for young sires and for traits that are age- and(or) cost-limited to measure. The methodologies developed and results generated from genetic evaluation system development are made freely available to partner breed associations and producer groups, and to the scientific community through abstracts, proceedings and peer-reviewed manuscripts.Objective 5 will be addressed through a partnership with the National Animal Germplasm Program (i.e., specific cooperative agreement with USDA-ARS) that is ongoing. A database for storage of genomic information on beef cattle has been developed and is being prototyped with data from a US beef breed association. This project will facilitate the completion of the database and introgression of genomic information already collected by breed associations but stored in disparate locations/universities/databases. At the present, we have deposited high density genotypes from 3,000 Angus cattle from the Beef Improvement center. These data coexist with the genotypes from >10,000 animals from the Red Angus and Hereford breeds. These data have allowed us to start to conduct genotype by environment analyses as described by Krehbiel et al. (2015 and 2016) as per collaboration with the Red Angus Association of American and the American Hereford Association. Another example of these collaborative successes is the report of Culbertson et al. 2015b.Objective 6 is ongoing, as the "Animal Geneticists Discussion Group" is already maintained, used and promoted by the breeding and genetics team at Colorado State University. Current subscriptions number 1700.