Exploitation of genomic technologies for sustainable intensification of dairy goats

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.This project will identify sires with daughters that readily breed out of season and 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 of a low density (LD), lower cost customised single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array for UK goats. This allows the imputation from LD to the higher density SNP arrays and a greater proportion of the outer herd nucleus to be genotyped, thereby creating greater uptake and impact to a the wider UK goat population and beyond.