Nowadays, there is a great interest in using lignocellulosic materials as substrate for the production of biorefi nery products. Eucalypti are good options to use as crops to obtain different kinds of biofuels and derivatives, since their plantations show high adaptation potential to soil and weather conditions in Uruguay. The basic process steps involved in the obtainment of biorefi nery materials are:pretreatment, hydrolysis, fermentation and products separation.

ABSTRACT. Growth curves are useful for describing the sigmoid shape of an animal?s weight pattern over time. The purpose of the present study was to describe, for the first time, a complete growth curve for pasture-fed Angus cows in Uruguay and to analyze the major fixed effects that affect the estimation of mature cow weight (CW). A total of 22,743 records from 5,284 cows belonging to 73 herds were used in the statistical analysis.

ABSTRACT. Leaf rust (caused by Puccinia triticina Eriks.) is an important disease of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) in Uruguay; therefore breeding for resistance to this disease has been a long-term objective for the INIA wheat-breeding program. Information on the identity of resistance genes present in the program is required to design strategies to breed for effective and more durable resistance. The leaf rust resistance genes present in seven adapted cultivars that have been extensively used in crosses were studied.

ABSTRACT. In 1999, INIA Uruguay initiated a plant breeding programme on Lotononis bainesii Baker, a subtropical forage legume from Southern Africa. Seeds from nine different geographical origins were grown and subsequently hand-crossed. Ninety crosses were generated and their variability was used to improve disease resistance, and forage and seed yield. Fusarium oxysporum, a fungal pathogen responsible for crown and stolon rot, is common in Uruguayan soils and the only public cultivar available is reported to be susceptible to this pathogen.

ABSTRACT. To establish the effects of access time to high-quality temperate fresh forage (FF) on intake and performance of cows fed a total mixed ration (TMR), 9 Holstein cows were assigned to three 3 × 3 Latin squares with 20-d periods with sampling in the last 10 d. The following treatments were evaluated:0 (T0), 4 (T4), and 8 (T8) h of daily access to FF. Forage (Lolium multiflorum) was cut daily and offered ad libitum beginning at 0800 h in individual stalls, and a TMR was offered ad libitum during the period when cows had no access to FF.

ABSTRACT. To establish the effects of access time to high-quality temperate fresh forage (FF) on intake and performance of cows fed a total mixed ration (TMR), 9 Holstein cows were assigned to three 3 × 3 Latin squares with 20-d periods with sampling in the last 10 d. The following treatments were evaluated: 0 (T0), 4 (T4), and 8 (T8) h of daily access to FF. Forage (Lolium multiflorum) was cut daily and offered ad libitum beginning at 0800 h in individual stalls, and a TMR was offered ad libitum during the period when cows had no access to FF.

ABSTRACT. The objectives of this study were to develop and evaluate an efficient implementation in the computation of the inverse of genomic relationship matrix with the recursion algorithm, called the algorithm for proven and young (APY), in single-step genomic BLUP. We validated genomic predictions for young bulls with more than 500,000 genotyped animals in final score for US Holsteins. Phenotypic data included 11,626,576 final scores on 7,093,380 US Holstein cows, and genotypes were available for 569,404 animals.

ABSTRACT. The massive use of pesticides and herbicides to increment the agriculture production can produce severe environmental impacts. This implies the need of new methods to monitor and control the use of chemical agents.An alternative to traditional sampling methods is the use ofinsects to act as a biological distributed sensor in order to monitor the presence of pesticides in the neighbourhood. Specifically, several authors have proposed the use of the beehive as a distributed sensor. To evaluate critical changes in the beehive behaviour, the sound patterns are analysed.

Abstract: Using autumn-lambing ewes, this study investigated (i) the effects of diet on gonadotrophin secretion and responsiveness of the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axis to exogenous GnRH during the early post-partum period; and (ii) whether ovulation prior to completion of uterine involution results in an increased incidence of aberrant ovarian cycles. Thirty-two ewes rearing 1.9±0.12 lambs were equally allocated to two dietary treatments at lambing (22 October ±0.2 day).