Genomic Breeding values from Across Breed Prediction in Practice: Accuracy of Beef-CRC Genomic Breeding Values in Australian Angus and Australian Brahman beef cattle

Abstract

Genomic selection in the Australian beef cattle sector is challenged by the variety of small breeds and a low number of phenotyped and genotyped individuals in each breed. The Beef Cooperative Research Center (Beef CRC) derived prediction equations (PE) on mixed-breed and pure-breed training sets. This paper presents the accuracy of the resulting genomically estimated breeding values (GEBV) assessed by their genetic correlation to their phenotypic target trait recorded in the seed-stock cattle populations of Australian Angus and Brahman. Accuracies of the majority of GEBVs was between 0.1 and 0.4, and were highest when the PE of the pooled across-breed training population were used. The difference in accuracies from using pure-breed PEs were small. Results were generally low compared to accuracies estimated within breeds, but in line with those derived in other across-breed populations. Thus prediction equations derived by the Beef CRC can contribute to the implementation of genomic selection in Australian beef cattle breeding.