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The summer of 2017 saw the publication of a scientific paper titled ''Y Chromosome Uncovers the Recent Oriental Origin of Modern Stallions'' with the outcomes found in this paper covered by Eric Mitchell in the Blood Horse that year. The paper at the time, while generally a broad discussion about the origins of the equine breed, did raise some ...

This morning you may see that we have extended the computations of the Coefficient of Inbreeding and Coefficient of Relatedness to 10 generations. These coefficients were previously calculated over 8 and 6 generations respectively and were done to that generation previously due to computational restrictions, i.e, the speed of the computers and the ...

Last week on Twitter we were interested to see if there were any thoughts on the most popular nick ratings. After getting the seeds of some ideas for what constituted a the most tried/successful nicks, we decided to gather the data, as one should, to see what story was told. In order to make it fair we stuck to the following: Direct ...

A couple of weeks ago the manager of a TrueNicks enrolled stallion called to tell us that a hypothetical mating had generated Dosage Figures that were all zeroes – zeroes for each category in the Dosage Profile; a Dosage Index of zero; and a Center of Distribution of zero. A check confirmed that this was not an error, and nor was it the result of ...

We've mentioned on more than one occasion that it's next to impossible to accurately appraise young stallions until they've at least had a couple of crops at the races. That said, the progress of those with their early crops at the races is always interesting, and a look at this year's current leading freshmen reveals quite a reshuffle from the ...

A year or so ago another company that I am associated with, Performance Genetics, did a private study on mitochondrial DNA, the strand of DNA that is maternally inherited in all species and can be used to classify female lineages. We were specifically looking into the #1 family of Tregonwell's Natural Barb which is now that of the likes of Black ...

The battle for the leading freshman sire crown in Australia and New Zealand for 2014-15 may well come down to Fastnet Rock vs. the rest. Fastnet Rock While there is plenty of interest among the current freshman crop, there is no doubt that one of the more intriguing developments to watch will be the progress of the first contingent of sons of ...

Distribution of talent, by its very nature, tends not to be egalitarian. Competitive sport is an arena where that fact is particularly revealed, and students of the history of any such activity will be well aware of ''Golden Years'' or ''Golden Eras'' when several stars simultaneously made their presence known. A look at stallion crops over the ...

Following on from the earlier post on the racing class of the dam, we decided to take a look at the fluctuation in graded/group stakes winners over the first eight crops of a stallion's career. We took some 50 proven stallions and extracted out the number of graded stakes winners sired in each of their first eight crops. As you will note, they ...

As we get ready for the start of the Northern Hemisphere yearling sales series, one of the more pertinent questions that we are often asked at TrueNicks is how important is the racing class of the pedigree at hand in determining the success of a mating. While the TrueNicks rating of a yearling can be the same, the chances of a stakes winner ...