The Impact of Genetic Relationship Information on Genome-Assisted Breeding Values

The success of genomic selection depends on the potential to predict genome-assisted breeding values (GEBVs) with high accuracy over several generations without additional phenotyping after estimating marker effects. Results from both simulations and practical applications have to be evaluated for this potential, which requires linkage disequilibrium (LD) between markers and QTL. This study shows that markers can capture genetic relationships among genotyped animals, thereby affecting accuracies of GEBVs. Strategies to validate the accuracy of GEBVs due to LD are given. Simulations were used to show that accuracies of GEBVs obtained by fixed regression-least squares (FR-LS), random regression-best linear…