"Linking genotype to phenotype to advance breeding and biological knowledge from an animal breeding and genomics perspective."

Dr. James Koltes,

Wednesday, March 4th, 2026

Agronomy 3140, 3:00 – 4:00 pm

Session Description: Current efforts in applied animal breeding focus largely on traits such as animal health, efficiency and production resilience.  This seminar will discuss efforts to develop breeding tools to accelerate genetic improvement in feed efficiency, methane yield and animal health in dairy cattle.  Applications of precision sensing technologies to develop new trait information sources for these focus areas will also be discussed. Genomic data is a central part of breeding strategies for these traits.  It is believed that the identification of causal mutations will allow for routine genotyping to increase prediction accuracies of breeding values.  However, few causal mutations for quantitative traits have been identified, limiting their impact in animal breeding. Efforts to integrate large public data to help researchers identify causal genetic markers in the livestock QTLdb and AgSCREEN projects will be discussed.

Dr. James Koltes is an Associate Professor within the Animal Breeding and Genetics group in the Department of Animal Science at the Iowa State University. His research has two main focuses areas, including: 1) identification of new traits for use in the genetic improvement of sustainability traits in dairy cattle (e.g., feed intake and methane yield); and 2) development of bioinformatics tools to help link genotype to phenotype.  Dr. Koltes is particularly interested in leveraging data reuse to develop tools for public good that help other genetics and genomics scientists in their respective research areas. At ISU, he is a member of the IGG and BCB interdepartmental graduate programs and also an advisor to the Translational AI center (TrAC). Dr. Koltes is an instructor for ANS 3510 Principals of Domestic Animal Genetics, ANS 4340 Dairy Systems Management, ANS 5560 Current Topics in Genome Analysis and ANS 6530 Applied Breeding Strategies.

To learn about the Koltes Livestock Genetics lab visit the website at: https://jekolteslab.yolasite.com/