Short communication: Iodine content in bovine milk is lowly heritable and shows limited genetic variation

Milk and dairy products are considered important sources of iodine in several countries. Despite this, there is a paucity of studies that have investigated sources of variation of milk iodine, especially on a large scale. So far, it is not clear if milk iodine content could be increased through breeding in dairy cattle. Recently, a mid-infrared spectroscopy prediction model has been developed for an indirect quantification of iodine content in cow milk, as it is a faster and less expensive method that allows the prediction at population level. The model has coefficient of determination and ratio of performance to deviation in external validation of 0.57 and 1.44, respectively, and it was used in the present study to predict the iodine content from historical milk spectral data to investigate phenotypic and genetic aspects in the Italian Holstein cattle. Based on the accuracy of the model, the prediction was interpreted as proxy for the real milk iodine concentration (IODP). The data set comprised 33,776 test-day records with IODP from 4,072 cows. Data of IODP were transformed through natural logarithm to achieve a normal distribution. The effect of parity, lactation stage, and month of sampling were investigated, and genetic parameters were estimated using a test-day repeatability animal model. Milk IODP decreased with parities and was the lowest in early lactation. Heritability of IODP was low (0.025) and it was positively genetically correlated with milk yield and negatively with fat content. Results suggested that it would be challenging to directly improve this trait through breeding strategies in dairy cattle, because IODP is mainly affected by temporary environmental factors and thus, cannot be easily improved through genetics. Although preliminary, findings of this study suggest that it would be more convenient to develop feeding and management strategies to drive milk iodine level than to put efforts and resources into breeding strategies. Further studies should validate IODP as an indicator trait of milk iodine content by improving reference data and estimating genetic correlation between predicted and measured values.