RESEARCH ARTICLE Transcriptional profiling o

Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleBackground In dairy cattle, milk yield and milk components are two of the most important economic traits. DNA-based marker-assisted selection has certain advantages over the trad-itional dairy cattle breeding programs, such as shortening of the generation interval and enhancing the selection accuracy of young bulls, by incorporating detected quantitative trait loci (QTLs) into the genetic evaluation. Therefore, since the first report by Georges et al. [1], ex-tensive QTL mapping has been implemented to detect QTLs with large effects on milk production traits. As of August 23, 2013, 422, 823, and 648 QTLs for milk yield, milk protein, and milk fat have been reported via marker-QTL linkage analysis (LA) and/or linkage disequilibrium (LD