Recent progress in livestock genomics and potential impact on breeding programs

Most of the major livestock breeding organizations in the world are actively involved in using the emerging tools for genome analysis to obtain a better understanding of the molecular architecture of their favourite production traits. This is bound to generate a considerable amount of novel biological information that will provide a competitive advantage to those that have access to it. At present, the preferred avenue to exploit this information is via marker-assisted selection (MAS), and several breeding organisations are starting to implement MAS in breeding programs. However, it seems unlikely that the exploitation of genomics information will be limited to MAS in the future. Even though it is difficult to anticipate the ultimate impact of genomics on animal production, it would be very surprising if it were not to revolutionize this industry as it is already revolutionizing the biomedical and plant breeding industries.