Wrong and Missing Sire Information Affects Genetic Gain in the Angeln Dairy Cattle Population

Abstract

In the present study, molecular genetic markers were used to help estimate the degree of wrong sire information in the German Angeln dairy cattle population. Sixteen polymorphic microsatellite markers were genotyped on 5 different paternal half-sib families with a total of 805 daughters. For the genotyping process, blood samples of the daughters and semen samples of the sires were used. Allelic frequencies and exclusion probabilities were estimated. The simultaneous effect of wrong (WSI) and missing sire information (MSI) on the reliability of estimated breeding values and on the genetic gain was investigated using deterministic simulations. For these simulations, different values for the number of daughters per sire, heritability, WSI, and MSI were chosen. The estimated proportion of the WSI was 7% in the German Angeln dairy cattle population. The combined impact of WSI and MSI on the genetic gain was relatively large, especially in the case of small progeny size per sire and low heritability. The impact of WSI was more harmful than MSI on response to selection.

Effects of missing pedigree information on dairy cattle genetic evaluations (short communication)

“…Although in developed countries missing pedigree data (especially sires) is a problem for beef cattle populations, in developing countries, missing record and pedigree data has remained a serious problem for dairy cattle populations. However, even developed countries are not free of these errors (HARDER et al, 2005;SANDERS et al, 2006). While models of evaluation become more complicated just to increase the accuracy a little bit, improving data quality can do all that complicated models cannot do.…”

“…There are two kinds of pedigree errors affecting the results of genetic evaluations, including wrong and missing pedigree information (HARDER et al, 2005). The impact of pedigree errors on reducing genetic gain is large and the effect of wrong pedigree is 1.4 times more harmful than the effect of missing pedigree (SANDERS et al, 2006). Missing parents leads to serious underestimation of inbreeding and therefore making necessary decisions against inbreeding may be delayed (LUTAAYA et al, 1999;HARDER et al, 2005).…”

“…LUTAAYA et al (1999) simulated various percentages of dam missing information and reported considerable underestimation of inbreeding in the population. In order to decrease the proportion of unknown paternity and increase the average number of daughters per sire, breeding organizations should recheck their recording and verification systems (SANDERS et al, 2006). Although in developed countries missing pedigree data (especially sires) is a problem for beef cattle populations, in developing countries, missing record and pedigree data has remained a serious problem for dairy cattle populations.…”

Assessing the impact of natural service bulls and genotype by environment interactions on genetic gain and inbreeding in organic dairy cattle genomic breeding programs

“…Not only the lack of phenotypes, but also a lack of pedigree information favours the application of marker-based methodology. Sanders et al (2006) used molecular microsatellite markers to identify pedigree errors in the German Angeln dairy cattle population. High throughput SNP marker data not only contributes to pedigree error identification, but also to setting up complete genomic-based relationship matrices in small populations for genomic evaluations.…”

Selecting an appropriate genetic evaluation model for selection in a developing dairy sector

“…A key problem is the accuracy of the pedigree information. Research shows that pedigree misidentification is common (Visscher et al, 2002;Weller et al, 2004, Sanders et al, 2006 and can reduce the accuracy of breeding values and hence reduce genetic gain (Sanders et al, 2006). This is likely to be an even greater problem in Pakistan, but in the short-term is unavoidable.…”