2012 WORLD HOLSTEIN CONFERENCE - Dansk Holstein

SESSION 3: IMPROVING REPRODUCTIONUSING NEW TECHNOLOGIESPotential Market Value of Reproductive TechnologiesSVEN KÖNIG (GERMANY)Doctor Sven König is a Professor of Animal Breeding at the Universityof Kassel in Kassel, Germany. While completing his PhD at theInstitute of Animal Breeding and Genetics, University of Göttingen,he was an employee at the dairy cattle co-operation, TopQ’. Inaddition to his work as a Professor, König’s current research includesanalyses of SNP-data (Imputation, estimation of genomic breedingvalues, population genomics) and evaluation of genomic breedingprograms with a focus on dairy cattle. Prior to becoming a Professor,he was the Head of the group Biometrics and Agricultural ComputerSciences at the Department of Animal Sciences at the University ofGöttingen and also was a visiting researcher at the Department ofAnimal and Poultry Science, at the University of Guelph in Guelph,Ontario, Canada with Professor Larry Schaeffer.Ranking of sires in national or international top-lists strongly determines their market value, and consequently,competiveness of dairy cattle breeding programs. In the past and in the future, reproductive technologies have beenand will be applied with a focus on increasing both genetic gain per year and associated economic evaluation criteria.From this perspective, the current paper evaluates the impact of artificial insemination, embryo transfer, ovum pickup and in vitro fertilization, sperm sexing, and cloning. Results from real data analyses (retrospective analyses) aswell as from model calculations are used to compare various breeding program scenarios. The evaluation not onlyincludes the prospects of reproductive technologies, but also associated risks. In the case of artificial insemination,one favorable opportunity is semen transfer without regional and temporal limitations, also enabling multiple acrosscountry evaluations. The undesired side-effect is the strong focus on just a few, influential sires in breeding programsworldwide, resulting in an increase of inbreeding and genetic relationships. Also, to cite another example, adultcloning enables the creation of identical copies of influential bull sires or show cows increasing their market value in theshort term, but cloning will decrease selection response in the long-term perspective due to the substantial reductionof genetic variance. Finally, reproductive technologies will be discussed in the context of molecular biotechnologyapplications. For the success of marker assisted selection in bottom up or top down designs, the increase of femalereproductivity via embryo transfer was imperative, but genomic selection reveals greater flexibility.18