학술논문

Trends in genetic diversity and the effect of inbreeding in American Angus cattle under genomic selection
Document Type
Academic Journal
Source
Genetics Selection Evolution. June 16, 2021, Vol. 53 Issue 1
Subject
Genetic research
Biological diversity
Cattle
Livestock
Zoology and wildlife conservation
Language
English
ISSN
0999-193X
Abstract
Background While the adoption of genomic evaluations in livestock has increased genetic gain rates, its effects on genetic diversity and accumulation of inbreeding have raised concerns in cattle populations. Increased inbreeding may affect fitness and decrease the mean performance for economically important traits, such as fertility and growth in beef cattle, with the age of inbreeding having a possible effect on the magnitude of inbreeding depression. The purpose of this study was to determine changes in genetic diversity as a result of the implementation of genomic selection in Angus cattle and quantify potential inbreeding depression effects of total pedigree and genomic inbreeding, and also to investigate the impact of recent and ancient inbreeding. Results We found that the yearly rate of inbreeding accumulation remained similar in sires and decreased significantly in dams since the implementation of genomic selection. Other measures such as effective population size and the effective number of chromosome segments show little evidence of a detrimental effect of using genomic selection strategies on the genetic diversity of beef cattle. We also quantified pedigree and genomic inbreeding depression for fertility and growth. While inbreeding did not affect fertility, an increase in pedigree or genomic inbreeding was associated with decreased birth weight, weaning weight, and post-weaning gain in both sexes. We also measured the impact of the age of inbreeding and found that recent inbreeding had a larger depressive effect on growth than ancient inbreeding. Conclusions In this study, we sought to quantify and understand the possible consequences of genomic selection on the genetic diversity of American Angus cattle. In both sires and dams, we found that, generally, genomic selection resulted in decreased rates of pedigree and genomic inbreeding accumulation and increased or sustained effective population sizes and number of independently segregating chromosome segments. We also found significant depressive effects of inbreeding accumulation on economically important growth traits, particularly with genomic and recent inbreeding.
Author(s): Emmanuel A. Lozada-Soto[sup.1], Christian Maltecca[sup.1], Duc Lu[sup.2], Stephen Miller[sup.2], John B. Cole[sup.3] and Francesco Tiezzi[sup.1] Background It has been more than two decades since the idea of using genomic [...]