Association of genomic breeding values and parental average breeding values with future phenotypic performance in Swedish Red cows

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to compare female genomically enhanced breeding values with parental average breeding values in how well those match the animal’s future phenotypes. At the early years of genomic selection mainly bulls were genotyped, but when the costs decreases, genotyping of heifers becomes more and more interesting. Higher accuracy when selecting replacement animals and better mating plans are some of the main arguments for genotyping heifers. Genotyping heifers in Sweden started in larger scale in 2012, with the start of VikingGenetics LD-project. The main reason was to get genotyped females into the reference population and thereby increase the accuracy of genomically enhanced breeding values. Since the start, over 10,000 females have been genotyped and production results from some of the animals’ first lactations have been recorded. Production, fertility, conformation and functionality records were analyzed from 2637 genotyped females. In general genomically enhanced breeding values and parental average breeding values worked best to predict future phenotypes for high heritability traits. Except for better genomic prediction for milkability there were no significant differences between indexes and their prediction of future phenotypes. There were tendencies of genomically enhanced breeding values functioned better then parental average breeding values for milk, fat and protein yield. Low accuracy of genomically enhanced breeding values and too few records for some traits could be some explanations of the results. Even though there were few significant differences between genomically enhanced breeding values and parental average breeding values the study indicated that also the conventional genetic evaluation, without genomic information works well for many of the studied traits. Furthermore, the study was made a bit early as some traits could not be analyzed fully because of few completed lactations. Future studies have to be made to confirm the results.