Exploitation of genomic technologies for sustainable intensification of dairy goats

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This project addresses key challenges facing the sustainable intensification of dairy goat milk production by using new genetic and genomic technologies to improve the efficiency of milk production and continuity of supply. A key constraint is the inability of dairy goats to naturally breed out of season, thereby affecting year-round supply of milk. This project therefore will identify sires with daughters that readily breed out of season and to generate genomic predictions of merit for this trait. The exploitation of such ability by the wider commercial goat industry in the UK and abroad will be enabled via genomic predictions for this and a range of other key traits via the development in this project of a low density (LD), lower cost customised single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array for UK goats. This will facilitate the imputation from LD to the higher density SNP arrays and allow a greater proportion of the outer herd nucleus to be genotyped, thereby creating greater uptake and impact to the wider UK goat population and beyond. The project will ensure that the balance of breeding objectives for dairy goats is sustainable in the long-term, by including routine collection of conformation scoring and mastitis records as proxy indicators of animal health and longevity into the genomic predictions, thereby helping to translate this and previous TSB-funded research into practice