Genome-wide selection and association in animal breeding using ssGBLUP

Abstract:

The objective of this work was to evaluate the efficiency of the ssGBLUP method for genome-wide selection and association, attributing weights to genetic markers and using genotype and phenotype information, with or without pedigree information, considering different coefficients of heritability. The studied population was obtained by data simulation with 8,150 animals, 5,850 of which were genotyped. The ssGBLUP method was used for data analysis, with two relationship matrices - with or without pedigree information -, and weights for the genetic markers obtained in each iteration. Increasing heritability coefficients improved the results of genomic selection and association. The best performance for predictive ability was obtained without pedigree information. The type of relationship matrix used did not affect the identification of regions associated with traits of interest. The ssGBLUP method is efficient both for selection and identification of regions associated with the studied traits.

Index terms:
kinship coefficient; predictive ability; heritability; cross-validation