POULTRY BREEDING IN MODERN POULTRY FARMING AND RESEARCH - A CONTEMPORARY-SURVEY

Modern poultry breeding - profiting from advances made in quantitative genetics - has been able to achieve the most remarkable genetic progress. Poultry offers a whole series of advantages (short intervals between generations, high reproductiveness, including that of the females, permanent hybridisation) for the application of approaches to breeding based on population genetics. The remarkable progress made in the field of bioengineering processes for enhancing the reproductiveness of female mammals is of no significance (at least at the present time) for contemporary poultry breeding. A more realistic view should also be taken of the prospects of molecular genetic advances for practical poultry breeding. Since most characteristics relevant to breeding are polygenic in origin, only quantitative genetics offers any possibility of working on such characteristics. As the key poultry production lies in hybrid breeding, the only research projects of any practical relevance are those which take adequate account of pure-breeding: hybrid relationships. In the field of breeding research, due attention should be paid to the study of environmentally relevant'' quantitative characteristics (c.f. utilization of energy and nutrients, and N and P excretion), and the improvement of product quality (example: egg composition vis-a-vis the cholosterol issue). Pronouncements on the influence of behavioural characteristics on breeding are likewise dependent on due determination of genetic population parameters, and hence quantitative approaches are of broad interest to behavioural genetics, too. On the other hand, attention should also be directed in future towards testing the effectiveness of individual diseases, which would provide special justification for concentrating on the search for suitable molecular genetic markers.