Integrate cow and bull data in a genomic evaluation for conformation traits and claw health

Abstract Text: The two objectives of this study were to investigate and find methods to successfully integrate cow data in the bull reference population for genomic evaluation and to investigate the effect of adding reference cows on the DGV reliability for conformation traits and claw health. Information from about 25,000 bulls and about 15,000 cows was available. Bulls were genotyped with the Illumina 50K SNP chip and the cows with the Illumina 10K SNP chip. All animals were imputed to an equal 50K SNP set. After SNP edits 37,995 SNP remain for all animals. As phenotypes, yield deviations, deregressed proofs (DRPs) with adjustments for cows and DRPs calculated based on matrix deregression will be used. The three kinds of phenotypes will be validated to investigate the effect on the reliability of direct genomic value for conformation traits and claw health.

Keywords:

cow data

genomic selection

conformation traits

claw health