In this chapter the characteristics of the main protein sources included in rabbit diets, protein digestion in young rabbits, nitrogen metabolism in the caecum of rabbits, soft faeces and its relation to protein digestibility, amino acid balance, and faecal digestibility in rabbits are discussed.

A review on the methods of determining the composition and nutritive value of the available feeds and feedstuffs for rabbits was presented in this chapter.

This chapter starts with an examination of international food prices in general, and then discusses the pattern of prices of the three most important food grains: maize, wheat and rice. It then focuses on one particular period - that of 1996 to 2008. It attempts to identify the many and various...

This review covers new theoretical and practical genomic selection (GS) advances and outcomes produced in the past 3–4 years in wheat. New models (improved mixed models and item-based collaborative filtering or IBCF) that deal with the complexity of genomic-enabled prediction and models for...

Recently, the expansion of genomic sequencing and genome editing are enabling progress directly in crops themselves. This is key since, while it is highly tractable, Arabidopsis thaliana is a model dicot, and so it will always be important to assess how relevant it is to crop plants. Nevertheless,...

This book contains 20 chapters, divided into two sections: (i) Quantitative Genetics: Plant Breeding, Bioinformatics, Genome Editing and G×E Interaction (Chapters 2-12) and (ii) Intersection of Breeding, Genetics and Genomics: Crop Examples (Chapter 13-20). Section 1 emphasizes the application of...

This chapter suggests that there is a contradiction between the need for diet diversity and crop uniformity, which is the main feature of industrial agriculture, and that there is also a contradiction between crop uniformity and the need to adapt crops to both short- and long-term climate change...

Pan-genomes help to describe the genomic variation within a species, and can be split into the core genome containing genes common to all individuals, and a dispensable (or variable) genome consisting of partially shared DNA sequence elements. This chapter discusses the importance of pan-genomes,...

This chapter describes the latest genome-editing techniques, including (i) engineered homing endonucleases/meganucleases; (ii) zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs); (iii) transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs); and (iv) clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic repeats...

This chapter initially considers the definition and structure of the different classes of fibre and of cell wall constituents, followed by a description of some analytical methods employed for animal or human feeds. Second, the effects of fibre on rabbit digestion are described.