Skip to main content
ARS Home » Northeast Area » Beltsville, Maryland (BARC) » Beltsville Agricultural Research Center » Animal Genomics and Improvement Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #304626
Title: Genotypes are useful for more than genomic evaluation

Author
item Vanraden, Paul
item SUN, CHUANYU - National Association Of Animal Breeders
item Cooper, Tabatha
item Null, Daniel
item Cole, John

Submitted to: International Committee on Animal Recording(ICAR)
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 4/9/2014
Publication Date: 5/19/2014
Citation: Van Raden, P.M., Sun, C., Cooper, T.A., Null, D.J., Cole, J.B. 2014. Genotypes are useful for more than genomic evaluation. International Committee on Animal Recording(ICAR). Proc. 39th Int. Comm. Anim. Recording Sess., Berlin, Germany, May 19–23, 4 pp.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: New services that provide pedigree discovery, breed composition, mating programs, genomic inbreeding, fertility defects, and inheritance tracking all are possible from low-cost genotyping in addition to genomic evaluation. Genetic markers let breeders select among sibs before their phenotypes became available, and 50,000 markers combined with larger reference populations greatly increased the reliability of genomic evaluations since 2008. With genotypes available for most sires, grandsires, and great-grandsires, fairly complete pedigrees can be discovered in dairy herds that had poor or no pedigree recording. For 289,390 females genotyped in 2013, 11% had no sire reported, 15% had an incorrect sire reported, and 6% had a non-genotyped sire reported. Of the 75,905 females with incorrect or missing sires, a true sire was suggested for 50,538 (67%). Breed composition for crossbred animals can be accurately estimated using large differences among breeds in allele or haplotype frequencies. An animal’s own genomic inbreeding is easy to estimate, and genomic instead of pedigree inbreeding in the next generation can be controlled by computing genomic relationships for each potential mate pair. Use of genomic instead of pedigree inbreeding gives an estimated benefit of $30 per female calf produced. A total of 18 recessive defects and simply inherited conditions are tracked or imputed for each genotyped animal. Web displays allow visual inspection of chromosomal breeding values and marker effects for each trait. Cost of genotyping is greatly reduced by reading a subset of the markers and imputing the rest, with a small reduction in accuracy. All of these services are now being or can be provided routinely for >500,000 genotyped animals in the North American database and are also available and routinely used by dairy producers from 35 other countries that submit genotypes to the database.