F1 trait variation ?

[Stocker Steve]

I spoke with a breeder who is crossing continental cattle w/ BA to increase marbling. He feeds them out and collects a lot of data. His observation is that the F1 feeding traits trend to one one of the parent breeds, and are seldom close to an average. Any comments here?

 

[Jake]

I spoke with a breeder who is crossing continental cattle w/ BA to increase marbling. He feeds them out and collects a lot of data. His observation is that the F1 feeding traits trend to one one of the parent breeds, and are seldom close to an average. Any comments here?

It's because of dominant genes. The reason you see hybrid vigor is because of dominance within gene pairs. It is also the reason you see a reduction of hybrid vigor in a f2.

 

[JWBrahman]

Funny how that works. The old Smith Brahman herd is right around the corner from me. The man who bought the herd stuck a tightly bred Line 1 Hereford bull with them trying to add substance and knock out some of the height. He wanted a happy medium and got everything else but that. The ones that had substance were still too tall and the more Brahman type were short and skinny.

 

[Stocker Steve]

His observation is that the F1 feeding traits trend to one one of the parent breeds, and are seldom close to an average. Any comments here?

It's because of dominant genes. The reason you see hybrid vigor is because of dominance within gene pairs..

Thanks - - that helps explain how out crossing can work in some cases to infuse a trait.
But here we have many F1s from the same two breeds - - and in my BA x continental example, and in the Herf x Brahman example above, which breed has the dominate gene is not at all consistent between a number of different individual pairings?
So are the preferred F1 crosses between similar types of breeds?