Evaluation of the potential use of a meta-population for genomic selection in autochthonous beef cattle populations
E.F. Mouresan,
J.J. Cañas-Álvarez,
A. González-Rodríguez,
S. Munilla,
J. Altarriba,
C. Díaz,
J.A. Baró,
A. Molina,
J. Piedrafita,
L. Varona
Affiliations
E.F. Mouresan
Departamento de Anatomía, Embriología y Genética, Universidad de Zaragoza, 50013 Zaragoza, Spain
J.J. Cañas-Álvarez
Grup de Recerca en Remugants, Departament de Ciència Animal 6i dels Aliments, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain
A. González-Rodríguez
Departamento de Anatomía, Embriología y Genética, Universidad de Zaragoza, 50013 Zaragoza, Spain
S. Munilla
Departamento de Anatomía, Embriología y Genética, Universidad de Zaragoza, 50013 Zaragoza, Spain; Departamento de Producción Animal, Facultad de Agronomía, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1417 CABA, Argentina
J. Altarriba
Departamento de Anatomía, Embriología y Genética, Universidad de Zaragoza, 50013 Zaragoza, Spain; Instituto Agroalimentario de Aragón (IA2), 50013 Zaragoza, Spain
C. Díaz
Departamento de Mejora Genética Animal, INIA, 28040 Madrid, Spain
J.A. Baró
Departamento de Ciencias Agroforestales, Universidad de Valladolid, 34004 Palencia, Spain
A. Molina
MERAGEM, Universidad de Córdoba, 14071 Córdoba, Spain
J. Piedrafita
Grup de Recerca en Remugants, Departament de Ciència Animal 6i dels Aliments, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain
L. Varona
Departamento de Anatomía, Embriología y Genética, Universidad de Zaragoza, 50013 Zaragoza, Spain; Instituto Agroalimentario de Aragón (IA2), 50013 Zaragoza, Spain
This study investigated the potential application of genomic selection under a multi-breed scheme in the Spanish autochthonous beef cattle populations using a simulation study that replicates the structure of linkage disequilibrium obtained from a sample of 25 triplets of sire/dam/offspring per population and using the BovineHD Beadchip. Purebred and combined reference sets were used for the genomic evaluation and several scenarios of different genetic architecture of the trait were investigated. The single-breed evaluations yielded the highest within-breed accuracies. Across breed accuracies were found low but positive on average confirming the genetic connectedness between the populations. If the same genotyping effort is split in several populations, the accuracies were lower when compared with single-breed evaluation, but showed a small advantage over small-sized purebred reference sets over the accuracies of subsequent generations. Besides, the genetic architecture of the trait did not show any relevant effect on the accuracy with the exception of rare variants, which yielded slightly lower results and higher loss of predictive ability over the generations.
