DNA pooling is a cost effective method of including commercial crossbred data in selection of purebreds

Abstract

<p>It is generally economically unviable to individually genotype large quantities of commercial crossbred broilers to predict purebred breeding values for crossbred performance. Pooling DNA of crossbreds with similar phenotypes, and genotyping the pool, could be a cost-effective alternative. To test this hypothesis, we used a dataset from a broiler three-way cross experiment consisting of ~9,000 individual genotypes and constructed pools of four different sizes (5, 10, 25, and 50 individuals). Estimated SNP effects and predicted sire breeding values from pooled genotypes were compared to results from individual genotypes, where number of individual genotypes was equal to number of pools. The pool size of 50 and 58 pools had a reasonable accuracy and bias (0.45 and 0.76, respectively) compared to 58 genotyped individuals (0.14 and 0.24). Our results indicate that DNA pooling may be used as a cost-effective means to obtain information on commercial crossbreds for selection in purebreds. </p>