Editorial: Genetics of reproduction for livestock species

Livestock farming provides a major source of animal protein and occupation opportunities for a large proportion of the world's population, and its profitability could be effectively increased by improvement of either feed efficiency (Zamani, 2017) or reproductive performance (Abdoli et al., 2016). Therefore, genetic improvement of reproductive efficiency is an important objective for animal production industries. Reproduction is a complex biological process with low to medium heritability, which indicates significant influences of environmental and non-additive genetic effects on reproductive performance (Zamani and Abdoli, 2019). Because of the low heritability of reproduction traits, classic selection methods are generally inefficient to achieve rapid genetic progression of reproduction performance in livestock species (Abdoli et al., 2019). However, the use of genetic markers may efficiently enhance the selection response of reproduction traits (Abdoli et al., 2016). Regarding the polygenic nature of reproduction traits, the determination of genetic markers and genetic pathways involved in reproduction efficiency needs intensive molecular genetic studies and use of high-throughput technologies, including genome-wide association studies, whole-genome sequencing, and whole transcriptome analysis.