Summary

From the second half of the 20 th century untill today in developed countries and the number of developing countries has been an increased interest for research and application scientific results.That resulted in substancial improvement of efficiency of animal production. In this paper we discussed the achivements for the most important domestic animals (cattle, pigs). Contributionts to the improvement in animal production mainly came, among the other scientific fields, from the genetics and reproduction. From biotechnological characteristcs here disussed the most important were genetics, artificial insemination. Conservation of semen, and than embryo transfer, while the in vitro fertilization, sex determination, cloning and production of transgenic animals are still in the stage of research and very limited application.

          Key words: Biotechnology, genetics, reproduction, animal product.