Journal article
Estimation of genomic breeding values for residual feed intake in a multibreed cattle population
M Khansefid, JE Pryce, S Bolormaa, SP Miller, Z Wang, C Li, ME Goddard
Journal of Animal Science | Published : 2014
Abstract
Residual feed intake (RFI) is a measure of the efficiency of animals in feed utilization. The accuracies of GEBV for RFI could be improved by increasing the size of the reference population. Combining RFI records of different breeds is a way to do that. The aims of this study were to 1) develop a method for calculating GEBV in a multibreed population and 2) improve the accuracies of GEBV by using SNP associated with RFI. An alternative method for calculating accuracies of GEBV using genomic BLUP (GBLUP) equations is also described and compared to cross-validation tests. The dataset included RFI records and 606,096 SNP genotypes for 5,614 Bos taurus animals including 842 Holstein heifers and ..
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Funding Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Gardiner Foundation (Melbourne, Australia) and Dairy Futures Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC, Melbourne, Australia) for funding this research. The authors also acknowledge Beef Cooperative research Centre in Australia and Centre for Genetic Improvement of Livestock, the University of Guelph and Livestock Gentec, the University of Alberta, and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada for providing part of the data used in this study.