Genetic Analysis of Milk Yield Using Random Regression Test Day Model in Tehran Province Holstein Dairy Cow

Document Type : Scientific - Research Articles

Authors

• Atefe Seyyeddokht ¹
• Ali Asghar Aslaminejad ²
• Mojtaba Tahmoorespur ²

¹ Department of Animal Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran.

² Department of Animal Sciences, Faculty of Agriculture, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran

10.22067/ijasr.v4i2.15148

Abstract

In this research a random regression test day model was used to estimate heritability values and calculation genetic correlations between test day milk records. a total of 140357 monthly test day milk records belonging to 28292 first lactation Holstein cattle(trice time a day milking) distributed in 165 herd and calved from 2001 to 2010 belonging to the herds of Tehran province were used. The fixed effects of herd-year-month of calving as contemporary group and age at calving and Holstein gene percentage as covariate were fitted. Orthogonal legendre polynomial with a 4th-order was implemented to take account of genetic and environmental aspects of milk production over the course of lactation. RRM using Legendre polynomials as base functions appears to be the most adequate to describe the covariance structure of the data. The results showed that the average of heritability for the second half of lactation period was higher than that of the first half. The heritability value for the first month was lowest (0.117) and for the eighth month of the lactation was highest (0.230) compared to the other months of lactation. Because of genetic variation was increased gradually, and residual variance was high in the first months of lactation, heritabilities were different over the course of lactation. The RRMs with a higher number of parameters were more useful to describe the genetic variation of test-day milk yield throughout the lactation. In this research estimation of genetic parameters, and calculation genetic correlations were implemented by random regression test day model, therefore using this method is the exact way to take account of parameters rather than the other ways.

Keywords

• Genetic parameters
• Holstein cattle
• Random regression
• Test day

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