Evaluation of the use of a Meta-population for Genomic Selection in Spanish Beef Cattle Breeds

ELENA F. MOURESAN; SEBASTIÁN MUNILLA; CLARA J. DÍAZ; ALDEMAR GONZÁLEZ-RODRÍGUEZ; JESÚS PIEDRAFITA; CARMEN AVILÉS; JESÚS A. BARÓ; CARLOS MORENO; LUIS VARONA

Vancouver

Congreso; 10th World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production (WCGALP); 2014

WCGALP 2014 Organizing Committee and American Society of Animal Science

A total of 116 triplets from 5 Spanish beef cattle populations were genotyped using the BovineHD BeadChip. After the quality control, the phases of the parental chromosomes were established. From them, a base population for each breed was defined and 3 generations of 500, 1000 and 1000 individuals were simulated. Phenotypes and true genomic breeding values for a trait with heritability 0.3 were simulated. Purebred and admixed populations were used as training sets for the genomic evaluation, and purebred populations were used for validation. The withinbreed evaluation yielded the highest accuracies (0.759 - 0.735). Moreover, the predictive ability of the admixed ×2 populations ranged between 0.681 and 0.628 for the populations included in the mixture. Further, the predictive ability of the admixed ×5 population ranged from 0.558 to 0.475.