With a major genetics breakthrough, Australia has taken an international lead in the race to breed the world's finest and most productive dairy cows with the aid of genetic fingerprinting.

Director of Reprogen Professor Herman Raadsma, and his team from the University's Faculty of Veterinary Science, made the breakthrough along with colleagues at the Dairy Cooperative Research Centre (CRC). The technology will allow dairy farmers to predict the on-farm performance of their animals with a high degree of accuracy, speeding up herd improvement and increasing farmers' profits.

The advance in genetic marker technology will enable dairy farmers to predict the quality and performance of a bull's offspring - well before its daughters are born. It will also allow the genetic potential of individual cows to be assessed.

Genetic markers are patterns in DNA associated with particular characteristics or traits. This new process of using genetic markers to make breeding decisions is known as genomic selection.

With genetic improvement a key component of dairy farmers' profitability, this offers a significant boost to productivity for the nation's $9 billion dairy industry, as well as a chance to capture valuable export markets for dairy semen and embryos with elite Australian dairy genetics

The CRC team is the first in the world to comprehensively link 15,000 genetic markers with 37 key dairy production traits. Testing for the particular genetic markers associated with traits such as milk output and quality, resistance to disease, length of lactation or even overall profitability will enable dairy breeders to select the best animals for use in their herds. The markers are now being evaluated in the field.

The advance was achieved by screening a record number of known genetic markers against the DNA of 1500 performance-tested Australian dairy sires supplied by CRC partner Genetics Australia Cooperative to create a database of over 22 million records.

This new dataset was compared with performance data for each of these 1500 bulls, contained in the national database of the Australian Dairy Herd Improvement Scheme (ADHIS).

An advanced statistical method was then used to determine the accuracy of the best panel of selected markers to predict heritable performance traits.

Currently, it takes at least six years before a bull's quality can be assessed through monitoring the on-farm performance of its daughters in a comprehensive bull-proving program that costs around $1 million for each bull that is chosen for widespread use in breeding.

Using genomic selection, a bull can be genetically tested for essential traits while still a calf, or potentially even before it is born (as an embryo), predicting the performance of its daughters with great accuracy. This will streamline the bull-proving cycle, reduce costs and speed the delivery of elite genetics to Australian dairy farmers.

For the first time, the genetic potential of individual dairy cows can be reliably identified. Previously this was not possible due to the small number of offspring and limited number lifetime lactation records per cow.

The new technology can give breeders equivalent information on each cow in their herd as they would get for a young progeny-tested bull. Furthermore, the inherent value of the national cow performance database held by ADHIS could be increased overnight if DNA tested cow records were to be included.

The advance is a combination of a major new technology - the highly successful gene chip (genetic testing) technology developed by Affymetrix, and unique Australian resources - namely the ADHIS database and DNA from elite dairy bulls provided by Genetics Australia Technology can now combine available data from 15,000 genetic markers against which any animal can rapidly be screened for 37 key production traits measured by ADHIS. From this a commercial DNA chip can be developed and used to predict an animals' genetic potential.

Professor Herman Raadsma said: 'It is the first time anyone has been able to assemble this much marker information across an entire animal genome, and show that high accuracy of genetic prediction can be achieved in industry populations.'

'There are teams all round the world trying to do this. Our success comes from investing early and boldly, and from having a very smart statistical approach,' said Professor Raadsma.

'Genomic selection will allow breeders to assess the potential of very young animals to be used as superior sires in the nation's breeding program, predicting with a great deal of certainty that their daughters will perform very well on-farm,' he said.

Professor Raadsma said: 'The same technology can potentially be applied to any animal or plant for which there is enough genetic information available - including beef cattle, sheep and, potentially even trees.'

'Trees take decades to grow and breed, so it would be a huge advance to know a tree's genetic potential when it is still a seedling.'

For the dairy industry, it will enable producers to speed the genetic gain and hence profitability of their herds, knowing how they will perform under Australian conditions. It could also open up exports of Australian elite genetics by predicting how animals will perform under other countries' conditions.

The discovery was made possible by the significant investment in new genetic technologies by the Australian dairy industry with the backing of the Australian Government through the CRC Program.