An official website of the United States government.
Maintain national database for genetic research on milk yield, composition, and fitness traits; develop improved methods for comparing genetic evaluations across countries; investigate accuracy of alternative methods of genetic evaluation; determine economic values of health and reproductive traits and develop measures of overall merit that included these traits; determine feasibility of using genetic markers to improve the accuracy of evaluated traits and prediction efficiency.
Expand the national database for dairy records by storing test-day instead of lactation data; provide more timely editing of records through daily submissions to the database; determine possible biases in current International Bull Evaluation Service procedures by investigating ability of international evaluations to predict future national evaluations; increase accuracy of evaluations by using multitrait analysis; compare results from a test-day model with those from the current lactation model to determine if it improves prediction of future progeny performance; evaluate current fertility data to determine their value in selection programs; improve economic indexes by estimating the relationships among traits and by updating relative economic values after literature review; develop a test-day model for traits such as productive life and somatic cell score; create a new semem repository for use in verification of quantitative trait loci (QTL) and estimation of allelic affects; develop tools to describe identified QTL based on experiment-wise error rates.