Additional genetic markers have been added to the IGENITY® profile, making it more powerful and offering beef producers more ’inside information’ than ever before.
Breeding values for marbling, retail meat yield, fat thickness and rib eye area have been enhanced as part of the panel upgrade, making the tool even more valuable for beef producers looking to evaluate these economically important traits.
There’s even a new trait for Average Daily Gain which is measured in kgs of gain per day. The IGENITY profile results for Average Daily Gain identifies an animal’s genetic potential for rate of gain, for both calves and post-weaning growth. Animals which score a 10 will gain an additional 0.37 kgs per day over animals which score a 1 – which means a 33 kg difference over 90 days
IGENITY also offers multiple marker analyses for traits such as tenderness, heifer pregnancy rate, longevity, calving ease and docility. Optional diagnostic tests are available for coat colour, myostatin, breed-specific horned/polled, parentage verification and persistent infections of the BVD virus
And it’s also cost effective, at just £30 per animal tested for the IGENITY panel. And the same can be said for testing for additional markers, such as Myostatin and horn poll. The ’add-on’ price is £12.50 per additional profile.
Adding new markers to the profile means that the amount of genetic variation accounted for in each analysis is much greater. The spread between a score of 1 from IGENITY and a score of 10 is now larger in most cases and, for the additional carcass traits, this means that producers can use the genetic profiling tool to pinpoint an animal’s potential – early in each stage of production – more accurately.
For example, the difference in a score of 1 and a score of 10 for rib eye area is more than 16 square centimetres. And the analysis for marbling represents a difference of 161.4 marbling points when comparing an animal with a score of 1 with an animal with a score of 10.
More confident selection, management and marketing decisions, early in every stage of production, can be made by producers who use the ’inside information’ gained from the IGENITY profile.
And because it’s comprehensive, producers can use the genetic profile to help evaluate multiple traits that directly affect their bottom line – all from a single DNA sample.
The range of traits analysed by IGENITY make it the most comprehensive DNA profile tool available to the beef industry. And Merial is committed to its gene marker research and will continue to add to the already broad range of IGENITY analyses.
