Genomic Evaluations using Combined reference Population from Montbéliarde and French Simmental breeds

Abstract Text: The French-Simmental and Montbéliarde breeds are currently evaluated jointly for production traits in international evaluations. Therefore, we investigated the feasibility of using the large reference population available in Montbéliarde breed to implement a genomic evaluation in French-Simmental. Data consisted in 229 Simmental and 1,758 Montbéliarde progeny tested bulls genotyped for a common set of 37,364 SNP. Genomic evaluations were performed using GBLUP and BayesCπ. SNP effects were either estimated based on Montbéliarde, Simmental or a joint reference population. Montbéliarde population was also used to preselect SNP before Simmental evaluation. Accuracy of evaluation was assessed based on the youngest Simmental bulls. Average correlations were 0.28 with SNP effects estimated in Montbéliarde, 0.39 with effects estimated in Simmental, 0.42 after pre-selection, and 0.48 with multi-breed reference population. This study demonstrates that the Montbéliarde reference population is beneficial to implement genomic evaluation in Simmental.

Keywords:

dairy cattle

genomic selection

multi-breed evaluation