Ben Hayes from the Department of Primary Industries, Victoria, Australia will give a talk on Thursday 27th January entitled: Genomic predictions within and across cattle breeds with 800K SNP markers. Time: 14.15 - 15.15
Place: UMB, Dept of Animal Sciences, auditorium H109 (formerly H185)
The accuracy of genomic predictions for key economic traits from 50,000 SNP markers in dairy cattle has been high enough to use this information to select young bulls and heifers for breeding, and such predictions are now widely used in the dairy industry. However, the extent of across breed linkage disequilibrium with 50,000 markers is very low, which means that the information from breeds which have been extensively tested, such as Holstein, cannot be used to increase the accuracy of genomic predictions in breeds with a more limited number of records. Likewise in beef cattle, the potential of using across breed information to improve genomic predictions is limited with 50,000 markers. Here we demonstrate that by genotyping a small number of key ancestors within breed for 750,000 SNP markers, and then using imputation to infer dense marker genotypes across the reference population, the accuracy of genomic predictions across breeds can be increased, provided an appropriate method of prediction is used.
