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Estimation of Genomic Breeding Values for Milk Yield in UK Dairy Goats
Genomic selection in UK dairy goats is in its initial stage. One of the main challenges is the small size and structure of the reference population (mixture of males and females). The objective of this study is to estimate genomic breeding value for milk yield in dairy goats. The research was based on data provided by two farms in the UK comprising 590,409 milk yield records on 14,453 goats. The pedigree contained 30,139 individuals. In total 1960 animals were genotyped with Illumina 50K caprine chip. BLUP-SNP and single-step approach were performed on the data and the two methods were compared. The highest accuracy was obtained with the single-step method. The results indicate that this method provides the best accuracy for populations with a small number of genotyped individuals, where the number of males is relatively low, and females are predominant in the reference population.
Keywords:
dairy goats
genomic selection
