Opportunities for collaborative phenotyping for disease resistance traits in a large beef cattle resource population

The Germplasm Evaluation (GPE) Project at the US Meat Animal Research Center (USMARC) is planned to produce about 3,000 calves per year in support of the following objectives: identification and validation of genetic polymorphisms related to economically relevant traits (ERT), estimation of breed and heterosis effects among 16 breeds for ERT, and estimation of genetic correlations among ERT and physiological indicator traits (PIT). Opportunities exist for collaboration in the development and collection of PIT phenotypes for disease resistance. Other areas of potential collaboration include detailed diagnosis (identification of disease causing organisms, etc.) of treated animals, collaborative development of epidemiological statistical models that would extract more information from the records of diagnoses and treatments, or pharmacogenetics. Concentrating a variety of different phenotypes and research approaches on the same population makes each component much more valuable than it would be individually.