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Genetic Parameter Estimates of Portuguese Dairy Cows for Milk, Fat, and Protein Using a Spline Test-Day Model

Departamento de Zootecnia - CECAV, Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro 5000-911 Vila Real, Portugal

Corresponding author: A. M. Silvestre; e-mail: asilvest{at}utad.pt.

A spline animal model was fitted to 152,103 test-day milk, fat, and protein yield records from 14,423 first-lactation cows. The models included age at calving and the herd-test-month as fixed effects. Model fitting was carried out using Restricted Maximum Likelihood with ASREML. For milk yield, the heritability at 18 d in milk was 0.19, which increased to the maximum estimated value of 0.23 at midlactation and then decreased. On average, milk, fat, and protein yield heritabilities were 0.22, 0.14, and 0.19, respectively.

For milk yield, all correlations were positive and ranged from 0.54 to 0.99 for the genetic component and from 0.32 to 0.78 for the phenotypic component. Genetic correlations were higher than phenotypic ones. For fat and protein yields, all genetic correlations were positive, ranging from 0.43 to 0.99. The phenotypic correlations for fat yield had the lowest correlations of the 3 traits.

Curves of estimated breeding values for milk, fat, and protein over lactation had positive deviations from mean curves for sires with high genetic merit, but there was considerable variability in the shapes of the curves for different sires. More research is needed to compare the spline function with other mathematical functions used as submodels of lactation curve.

Key Words: dairy cow • cubic spline • genetic effect • breeding value curve

Abbreviation key: r_g = genetic correlation, r_p = phenotypic correlation, TD = test-day

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