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Genomic predictions of fertility related disorders in Norwegian Red using 30 years of data
The aim was to investigate whether including information from later lactations improve accuracy of genomic breeding values for the 4 fertility related disorders cystic ovaries, retained placenta, metritis and silent heat. Data consisted of health records from 6,015,245 lactations from 2,480,976 Norwegian Red cows, recorded from 1979 to 2012. These were daughters of 3,675 AI-bulls. Genomic information was available for all sires. The 312 youngest bulls were used for validation. Genomic breeding values were predicted using G-BLUP for first lactation only (GEBV1) and for the first 5 lactations (GEBV5). Correlations between EBV for the 4 traits in 5 lactations with GEBV1 and GEBV5, respectively, were compared. Accuracy ranged from 0.17 to 0.65. Including later lactations improved accuracy of GEBV for cystic ovaries and retained placenta, while for metritis and silent heat no obvious advantage was found.
Keywords:
fertility related disorder, genomic prediction, dairy cattle
