Accuracy of Genomic Selection for BCWD Resistance in Rainbow Trout

Abstract Text: Bacterial cold water disease (BCWD) causes significant economic losses in salmonids. In this study, we aimed to (1) predict genomic breeding values (GEBV) by genotyping training (n=583) and validation samples (n=53) with a SNP50K chip; and (2) assess the accuracy of genomic selection (GS) for BCWD resistance. For BCWD survival days and survival status, Bayes B method yielded higher accuracy of GS than Bayes C. For both disease phenotypes, accuracy of GS with Bayes B was moderate (0.45-0.50). The low accuracy of GS was due to using small training and validation samples. However, the accuracy of GS evaluated with cross-validation was variable (0.49-1.09) with a pooled accuracy of 0.77. The accuracy of GS for BCWD resistance will be increased using larger training and validation samples. To our knowledge, this is the first evaluation of GS accuracy with experimental data in salmonids.

Keywords:

Disease resistance

Genomic selection

Rainbow trout