The inaugural 'Breeding Focus' workshop was held in 2014 to outline and discuss avenues for genetic improvement of resilience. The Breeding Focus workshop was developed to provide a forum for exchange between industry and research across livestock and aquaculture industries. The objective of Breeding Focus is to cross-foster ideas and to encourage discussion between representatives from different industries because the challenges faced by individual breeding organisations are similar across species. This book accompanies the Breeding Focus 2016 workshop. The topic of this workshop is 'Breeding Focus 2016 - Improving welfare'.

Economic losses in beef cattle due to bruised meat can be largely attributed to the presence of horns. While dehorning practices can provide some economic improvement, it is more labour intensive and is likely to be subject to renewed animal welfare legislation in the future. Breeding naturally polled animals is the long term alternative to reducing economic loss while maintaining best practice animal welfare. The haplotype Poll test is aimed to estimate the Poll genetics of an animal, given the alleles observed at 10 microsatellites in the vicinity of the Poll locus on chromosome 1. The following provides a summary of the genetics of polled cattle and the test used to estimate Poll probability of beef cattle.

Meat quality measures, including objective measures of tenderness (shear force and compression), were taken on 2 muscles ['M. longissimus thoracis et lumborum' (LTL) and 'M. semitendinosus' (ST)] from 7566 from temperate (TEMP) and tropically adapted (TROP) beef cattle breeds. Animals were finished to 1 of 3 market carcass weight end-points (220, 280, or 340 kg) either on pasture or in a feedlot, and in 2 different geographic regions for TROP. Both the phenotypic and genetic expression of the traits were estimated at each market weight and for each finishing regime. Heritabilities and correlations between the traits were estimated for TEMP and TROP separately. Smaller additive variances and heritabilities were observed for temperate breeds compared with tropically adapted breeds for most of the traits studied. For TROP, the heritability of traits measured on the ST muscle [compression (ST_C), shear force (ST_SF), and L* Minolta lightness value (ST_L*)] was 0.27, 0.42, and 0.16, respectively, and for traits measured on the LTL muscle [compression (LTL_C), shear force (LTL_SF), L* Minolta lightness value (LTL_L*), a* Minolta redness value (LTL_a*), cooking loss% (LTL_CL%), and consumer assessed tenderness score (LTL_TEND)] 0.19, 0.30, 0.18, 0.13, 0.20, and 0.31, respectively. For TEMP, the heritability of traits measured on the ST muscle [ST_C, ST_SF, ST_L*, a* Minolta redness value (ST_a*), cooking loss % (ST_CL%)] was 0.12, 0.11, 0.17, 0.13, and 0.15, respectively, and of traits measured on the LTL muscle (LTL_C, LTL_SF, LTL_L, and LTL_TEND) were 0.08, 0.09, 0.17 and 0.18 respectively. Genetic correlations were moderate to high for tenderness measures (shear force and compression) between muscles for the same tenderness measure (e.g. LTL_SF and ST_SF was 0.46 for TROP) and within a muscle for the different measures (e.g. LTL_SF and LTL_L* for TROP was -0.40). The genetic relationship between LTL_SF and LTL_TEND was -0.79 and -0.49 for TROP and TEMP, respectively. Finishing system affected the phenotypic expression of all traits. Pasture-finished, compared with feedlot-finished, animals had higher shear force and compression measures, darker meat colour, and lower sensory tenderness scores for both TEMP and TROP. For TROP, heifers had higher shear force and compression measures, lower sensory tenderness scores, and darker meat colour (lower L* values) than steers. Genetic correlations between markets were genera;;y high and close to unity with the exception of the ST_L*, LTL_L*, ST_C, and ST_SF for TEMP. Geographic region had little effect on the phenotypic and genetic expression of meat quality traits for TROP. Genetic correlations between finishing regimes for all traits were positive and close to unity, with the exception of ST_C and LTL_SF for TEMP, and LTL_L* and LTL_CL% for TROP. Genetic improvement of meat quality traits is a possibility for tropically adapted breeds given the moderate heritabilities, adequate phenotypic variance, generally favourable genetic correlations between traits, and little evidence of genotype by environment interactions.

The Poll DNA marker test is used to determine the poll genetics of an animal, given the alleles observed within the poll locus. This paper describes improvements made to the commercially available Poll DNA marker test, to capture more variability, enable predictions that are more accurate and clarify uncertainty of polled probabilities.