Genetic tests for estimating dairy breed proportion and parentage assignment in East African crossbred cattle.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Smallholder dairy farming in much of the developing world is based on the use of crossbred cows that combine local adaptation traits of indigenous breeds with high milk yield potential of exotic dairy breeds. Pedigree recording is rare in such systems which means that it is impossible to make informed breeding decisions. High-density single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) assays allow accurate estimation of breed composition and parentage assignment but are too expensive for routine application. Our aim was to determine the level of accuracy achieved with low-density SNP assays.

Methods

We constructed subsets of 100 to 1500 SNPs from the 735k-SNP Illumina panel by selecting: (a) on high minor allele frequencies (MAF) in a crossbred population; (b) on large differenc

SUBMITTER: Strucken EM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5596489 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature