The “metafounders” framework is used to augment relationship matrixes to accommodate
genetic structure in founder populations, and can be estimated from genotypes, making it useful to
align pedigree and genomic relationships in single-step genomic analyses. This paper aimed to
assess the value of metafounders in the genomic evaluation of beef traits in Australian Simmental
cattle, and in particular the possibility of collapsing genetic groupings based on metafounder
similarity. Estimated breeding values from metafounder models with different groupings had similar
predictive ability across 12 beef traits, while models with higher weighting on genomic relative to
pedigree information tended to perform better.