University of Guelph, Centre for Genetic Improvement of Livestock, Canada

The Centre for Genetic Improvement of Livestock (CGIL) is a research group affiliated with the Department of Animal & Poultry Science, part of the Ontario Agricultural College, at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada (UG-CAN).

Genetic and genomic research is done on numerous species of animals including aquaculture, beef, dairy, poultry and swine.

CGIL currently comprises 6 professors, 3 adjunct professors, 14 PhD students, 14 M.Sc. students and 10 post-doctorate fellows and research associates. The annual R&D income is approximately 2 million Dollars.

Computationally intensive methodology, combined with very large data sets, has been the environment in which CGIL was founded and continues to serve the industry. The strong partnership between the University of Guelph and the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture Food and Rural Affairs has enabled CGIL to develop key resource populations linking tissue and DNA samples with important phenotypes.

As an example, existing infrastructure allows comprehensive measures of beef cattle efficiency and meat quality. This infrastructure was instrumental in the success of a current 4-year project entitled genomic profiling for beef quality, efficiency and value. In dairy cattle a current 3-year project is investigating the use of genomic information to enhance genetic evaluation of dairy cattle, using dense SNP maps.