There were a couple of really interesting abstracts from the ISAG (International Society of Animal Genetics) meeting in Cairns Australia in July this year. Most of these will be at some stage published in Animal Genetics. In light of what is going on in thoroughbred circles right now, these ones caught my eye. S0107 Genetic architecture of complex traits and prediction of genetic value. M. Goddard*1,2, 1University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 2Department of P

Two really important scientific papers were published today (at least I think they are!). The first was a paper written by Matthew Binns to do with inbreeding in the thoroughbred. He and his team found (unsurprisingly) that the thoroughbred has increased in inbreeding coefficient in the last 40 years, and even more so since the advent of big stallion books. The papers is really quite eye opening as it outlines the rate of inbreeding and how with the advent of big books, the r