Ascertaining the breed composition of an admixed sheep population using genomic information: A simulation study

The aim of this study was to evaluate the reliability of estimating the breed composition of an admixed population using simulated data. Comprehending breed composition will help to discern the animal's ancestry and to define breed groups in genetic evaluation. The simulation was performed in two steps: initially, a historical population was simulated and then a recent population comprising two subpopulations was simulated. Haplotypes of these subpopulations were coded differently and selected randomly and independently for 5 generations, followed by a cross between them in generation 6, with further inter-crossing for the last 4 generations. True breed composition (TBC) was calculated from coded haplotypes for the crossbred population and later compared with results obtained from Admixture and BreedComp algorithms. BreedComp provided more accurate breed composition estimates than Admixture in this study. These findings suggest that the approach can be extrapolated to real data to assign animals into genetic groups to improve the prediction accuracy of breeding values.