New diagnostic tools helping poll breeding for sustainable beef production

Abstract

Management of horns in beef cattle has major economic and welfare impacts, and therefore, breeding for naturally hornless (polled) cattle is widely practiced. Poll breeding can be significantly accelerated by using DNA diagnostic tools (Prayaga 2007), and the Australian beef cattle industry has adopted the available DNA poll testing assays, which are generally successful. However, issues of applicability in Bos indicus cattle has arisen due to a more complex mode of inheritance of the horn phenotype. This study has investigated these limitations and further optimized the poll gene testing to increase accuracy and informativeness across all breeds. We also investigated if polled genetics were different than horned animals for beef production.