Genomic Selection for Live Weight in the 14th Month in Alpine Merino Sheep Combining GWAS Information

作者：Chenglan Li, Jianye Li, Haifeng Wang, Rui Zhang, Xuejiao An, Chao Yuan, Tingting Guo, Yaojing Yue · 发表于：Animals · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.3390/ani13223516 · 被引用次数：27 · 研究领域：Genetic and phenotypic traits in livestock、Cancer-related molecular mechanisms research、Genetic Mapping and Diversity in Plants and Animals

Alpine Merino Sheep is a novel breed reared from Australian Merino Sheep as the father and Gansu Alpine Fine-Wool Sheep as the mother, living all year in cold and arid alpine areas with exceptional wool quality and meat performance. Body weight is an important economic trait of the Alpine Merino Sheep, but there is limited research on identifying the genes associated with live weight in the 14th month for improving the accuracy of the genomic prediction of this trait. Therefore, this study’s sample comprised 1310 Alpine Merino Sheep ewes, and the Fine Wool Sheep 50K Panel was used for genome-wide association study (GWAS) analysis to identify candidate genes. Moreover, the trial population (1310 ewes) in this study was randomly divided into two groups. One group was used as the population for GWAS analysis and screened for the most significant top 5%, top 10%, top 15%, and top 20% SNPs to obtain prior marker information. The other group was used to estimate the genetic parameters based on the weight assigned by heritability combined with different prior marker information. The aim of this study was to compare the accuracy of genomic breeding value estimation when combined with prior marker information from GWAS analysis with the optimal linear unbiased prediction method for genome selection (GBLUP) for the breeding value of target traits. Finally, the accuracy was evaluated using the five-fold cross-validation method. This research provides theoretical and technical support to...