Sustainable breeding schemes Practical implications of utilisation and management

Utilisation and conservation of farm animal genetic resources 217 Glossary Breeding programme or a breeding scheme is a programme aiming at deined breeding objectives for the production of a next generation of animals. It is the combination of recording selected traits, the estimation of breeding values, the selection of potential parents and a mating programme for the selected parents including appropriate artiicial reproduction methods. Breeding value is the mean genetic value of an individual as a parent, for one trait or a combination of traits. It is estimated as twice the average superiority of the individual’s progeny relative to all other progeny under conditions of random mating. An individual’s breeding value deines its additive genetic value. Candidate gene is a gene chosen among genes known to afect a studied trait or among genes in a QTL region found as an important source of variation in a genome screen. See ‘Positional candidate’. Centi-Morgan is a linkage map distance of 0.01 Morgans, corresponding roughly to 1 per cent recombination; abbreviated cM. See ‘Morgan’. Chromosome is a discrete block of DNA and is one of the basic structures of the genome. All nuclear DNA is organised into chromosomes with the number varying between animal species. Genes on a chromosome are linked and tend to be inherited together. Clone animal is an individual that is genetically identical to another or a group of individuals that are genetically identical to each other. Co-ancestry is the relationship by a common ancestor of both one’s father and one’s mother; synonym for kinship coeicient. Co-dominance is a situation in which a heterozygote shows the phenotypic efects of both alleles equally. See ‘Additivity’. Comparative genomics is a joint analysis of the genome between two or more species, making use of known similarities between the structures of their genomes. Conservation potential is the marginal diversity multiplied by the extinction probability. It relects the beneit in terms of conserved diversity of making a breed completely safe.