Coordination of Beef Reference Population Projects

Genomic selection can increase selection response, especially for hard-to-measure, sex-limited traits, and those traits expressed later in life. Reference populations directly impact the benefits obtained from genomic selection, but the cost of developing and maintaining them is not insignificant.

This project has provided evidence-based guidance on where future investment in reference populations is required and has undertaken research to enable more effective reference populations.

Descriptions of the current status of beef reference populations found that for hard-to-measure traits, reference populations still required additional investment to enable genomic selection to benefit the whole breed. An empirical-based method for predicting the accuracy of genomic predictions was shown to predict accuracy better than current theoretical approaches. Several tools were developed that will assist in designing reference populations and determining the potential increase in EBV accuracy from genotyping individual animals. The impact of poor phenotype quality in the reference was determined to affect the prediction accuracy for those herds that submitted phenotypes identified as being of poor quality. In addition to genomic selection, reference populations provide a powerful resource for investigating novel phenotypes and the potential development of new EBVs. Immune competence traits were shown to be heritable with variation in northern beef breeds, while data from sensor technologies recording pasture feed intake were found unsuitable for genetic evaluation. Myostatin mutations were shown to be segregating in northern beef breeds.