Strategy & Growth (formally R&D)
The Strategy and Growth (S&G - formally R&D) group works in partnership with LIC's operational business units to help prepare LIC for future challenges. That support reaches all the way from day-to-day technical support to leadership in strategic developments such as gene discovery or the utilisation of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for disease control.
The development of intellectual capital within the S&G group is centred around the interface between genetic and genomic information, but also includes capabilities in the marriage of advanced reproductive technologies with breeding scheme design and economic modelling. Increasingly, the group is also involved in areas other than genetic improvement, such as disease control and eradication in dairy cattle.
S&G have developed and continue to improve on methods to determine how many, and which animals and traits to select in their breeding scheme. R&D have also been involved in research that will allow them to select genetically superior cattle more efficiently and at a younger age using molecular markers (marker-aided selection, or MAS). Support for LIC's Genetics Division also comes from the semen research group, an internationally acknowledged centre of excellence in semen research.
The S&G group has for many years maintained a strategic research alliance on bovine Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) and the University of Liege (Belgium). More recently, LIC has entered into a bovine genomics reseach alliance with ViaLactia Biosciences, a subsidiary of Fonterra Ltd. A major part of the research undertaken by that alliance is the Holstein-Friesian x Jersey cross-bred trial, set up to exploit genetic differences between the two breeds to discover QTL and genes for a whole array of traits in the F2 offspring generation of this cross.
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