334 Investigating core-dependent changes in predictions using the algorithm for proven and young in ssGBLUP

Abstract

Abstract Large-scale single-step GBLUP (ssGBLUP) evaluations rely on techniques to approximate or avoid the inversion of the genomic relationship matrix (G). The algorithm for proven and young (APY) was developed to create the inverse of G without explicit inversion, and relies on the clustering of genotyped animals into two groups, namely core and non-core. Although the correlation between GEBV from regular ssGBLUP and APY ssGBLUP is greater than 0.99 when the appropriate number of core animals is used, reranking is still observed when different core groups are used. We investigated which animals are more suitable to reranking and how the changes in GEBV can be minimized. Datasets from beef and dairy cattle, and pigs were used. The beef cattle data comprised phenotypes on 3 growth traits for up to 6.8M animals, pedigree for 8.2M, and genotypes for 66k. A dairy cattle data with 9M phenotypes for udder depth, 10M animals in pedigree, and 570K genotyped was used. The pig dataset had up to 770k phenotypes recorded on 4 traits, pedigree for 2.6M animals and genotypes for 54k. Investigations included using several different core groups, increasing the number of core animals beyond the optimal number obtained by the eigenvalue decomposition, and comparisons with GEBV from ssGBLUP with direct inversion (except for dairy). Additionally, observed changes were compared with possible changes based on SE of GEBV. In all datasets, larger changes in GEBV by using different core groups were observed for animals with lower accuracy. The observed changes relative to standard deviations of GEBV were, on average, 5% and ranged from 0 to 30%. Increasing the number of core animals beyond the optimal value helped to asymptotically reduce changes in GEBV. Although core-dependent changes in GEBV exist, they are small and can be reduced with larger core groups.