Impacts of additive, dominance, and inbreeding depression effects on genomic evaluation by combining two SNP chips in Canadian Yorkshire pigs bred in China

Abstract

At the beginning of genomic selection, some Chinese companies genotyped pigs with different single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays. The obtained genomic data are then combined and to do this, several imputation strategies have been developed. Usually, only additive genetic effects are considered in genetic evaluations. However, dominance effects that may be important for some traits can be fitted in a mixed linear model as either ‘classical’ or ‘genotypic’ dominance effects. Their influence on genomic evaluation has rarely been studied. Thus, the objectives of this study were to use a dataset from Canadian Yorkshire pigs to (1) compare different strategies to combine data from two SNP arrays (Affymetrix 55K and Illumina 42K) and identify the most appropriate strategy for genomic evaluation and (2) evaluate the impact of dominance effects (classical’ and ‘genotypic’) and inbreeding depression effects on genomic predictive abilities for average daily gain (ADG), backfat thickness (BF), loin muscle depth (LMD), days to 100 kg (AGE100), and the total number of piglets born (TNB) at first parity.

Quanshun Mei

Postdoctoral researcher

My research interests include applying genomic selection and machine learning in animal breeding.