A

Glossary

Abattoir A slaughterhouse.

ADED Agriculture Data Element Dictionary.

ADIS Agriculture Data Interchange Syntax.

Adjusted traits Traits adjusted to facilitate more meaningful comparisons such as 365 day weights or eye muscle area adjusted to constant weight or age.

Ad-libitum feeding Feeding to appetite.

Age at puberty The age at which an individual becomes physiologically capable of sexual reproduction.

Alleles Alternate forms of genes. Because genes occur in pairs in body cells, one gene of a pair may have one effect and another gene of that same pair (allele) may have a different effect on the same trait.

Allelic frequencies The frequency with which a particular allele appears among the possible alleles in a population.

Animal Breeding The practical application of genetic analysis for development of lines of domestic animals suited to human purposes.

Animal ID The unique identification of an animal.

Anus area The surface area of an animal’s body observed from the rear, specifically the area under the tail, around the anus.

Artificial insemination The technique of placing semen from the male into the

reproductive tract of the female by means other than natural service.

ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange.

ASCII file American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character set (256 characters) and a character encoding based on the Roman alphabet as used in modern English. ASCII codes represent text in computers, in other communications equipment, and in control devices that work with text.

Assay An assay is a procedure where a property of a system or object is measured.

Average daily weight gain The total live weight increase between two weight recordings, divided by the number of days between the two weighing records.

Average days to calving The number of days from when bull has access to breeding females to calving when natural mating exposure is practiced during a breeding season.

Average lifetime calving interval The number of days between first and last calving divided by the number of lifetime calvings (days).