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Genomics for Pedigree and Cross-bred Beef Cattle Populations; Some experiences from Ireland
Multi-breed genomic selection in beef cattle in Ireland is expected to be launched in 2014 based on a population of >3000 high reliability purebred AI beef sires, ~30,000 natural mating beef sires and 100,000 commercial crossbred beef cows. Breeding companies (AI bulls) and breeders/producers (natural mating bulls and cows) will have open access to the genomic proofs based on our custom dairy-beef genotyping platform with 19,000 SNPs which also monitors lethal recessive mutations, congenital defects and major genes. Producers and breeders will be able to more confidently select genetically elite animals on either of our two beef national breeding goals; dairy farmers will be able to select genetically elite beef bulls (AI or natural mating) for use on their dairy herd.
Keywords: Imputation, Single nucleotide polymorphism, Genomic selection
