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Rates of inbreeding and genetic diversity in I ranian H olstein C attle
Author(s) -
Dadar Mohsen,
Mahyari Saeid Ansari,
Rokouei Mohammad,
Edriss Mohammd Ali
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
animal science journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.606
H-Index - 38
eISSN - 1740-0929
pISSN - 1344-3941
DOI - 10.1111/asj.12228
Subject(s) - inbreeding , genetic diversity , biology , diversity (politics) , holstein cattle , genetics , zoology , evolutionary biology , microbiology and biotechnology , dairy cattle , demography , population , sociology , anthropology
Abstract The accumulation of inbreeding and the loss of genetic diversity is a potential problem in H olstein dairy cattle. The goal of this study was to estimate inbreeding levels and other measures of genetic diversity, using pedigree information from I ranian H olstein cattle. Edited pedigree included 1 048 572 animals. The average number of discrete generation equivalents and pedigree completeness index reached 13.4 and 90%, respectively. The rate of inbreeding was 0.3% per year. Effective number of founders, founder genomes, non‐founders and ancestors of animals born between 2003 and 2011 were 503, 15.6, 16.1 and 25.7, respectively. It was proven that the unequal founder contributions as well as bottlenecks and genetic drift were important reasons for the loss of genetic diversity in the population. The top 10 ancestors with the highest marginal genetic contributions to animals born between 2003 and 2011 and with the highest contributions to inbreeding were 48.20% and 63.94%, respectively. Analyses revealed that the most important cause of genetic diversity loss was genetic drift accumulated over non‐founder generations, which occurred due to small effective population size. Therefore, it seems that managing selection and mating decisions are controlling future co‐ancestry and inbreeding, which would lead to better handling of the effective population size.