Animal Breeding in the Next-Generation Sequencing Era

Abstract Text: It appears that we are finally close to being able to answer Sewall Wright’s 75 year old question. If we had a catalog of causal variants for which we knew allele frequencies and directions and magnitudes of effect across breeds, we would jointly assay them in a low-cost and high-throughput manner and then compute a molecular breeding value (as a selection index across loci) for each trait and perhaps also for an index of traits for each individual to enable selection to proceed population-wide.

Keywords: molecular breeding, next generation sequencing