A large population study to assess the magnitude of prenatal programming in dairy cattle

作者：Corentin Fouéré, Marie-Pierre Sanchez, Mekki Boussaha, Sébastien Fritz, Aurélie Vinet, Hélène Kiefer, Didier Boichard, Chris Hozé · 发表于：Journal of Dairy Science · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.3168/jds.2023-24051 · 被引用次数：5 · 研究领域：Birth, Development, and Health、Reproductive Physiology in Livestock、Assisted Reproductive Technology and Twin Pregnancy

The performance of an adult dairy cow may be influenced by events that occur before her birth. The present study investigated the potential effects of 2 prenatal groups of factors, assisted reproductive technologies and maternal characteristics (e.g., dam parity), on offspring performance during their first lactation in populations of 2 dairy cow breeds: French Holstein and Montbéliarde. The different assisted reproductive technologies studied included the type of semen (conventional or X-sorted) used for AI and the technology of conception used (AI, embryo transfer, or in vitro fertilization). Three maternal characteristics were considered: (1) the dam age at first calving, (2) dam parity number, and (3) indicators of dam udder health during gestation (SCS and events of clinical mastitis). First, we investigated whether heifer survival from 3 d to 18 mo old was associated with any of the prenatal factors considered. We then estimated the associations of these prenatal factors with 8 traits of commercial interest: (1) stature, (2-4) milk, fat, and protein yields, (5) SCS, (6) clinical mastitis, and (7-8) heifer and cow conception rate, all measured on genotyped cows. Linear models were used for this study with the prenatal factors as covariates in the model, and for the 8 traits, phenotypes were adjusted for their corresponding genomic EBV. The results indicated that the survival rate of heifers born from embryo transfer was significantly higher than that of heifers born from...