Importance du phénotypage pour maintenir la précision des prédictions génomiques des caractères mesurés en station

Abstract

Genomic evaluation of French maternal lines, set up in 2016, has helped increase genetic progress, especially for reproductive traits. However, computational problems have emerged for genomic evaluation of certain production traits for which phenotyping capacity is limited. This particularly concerns genotyped candidates on breeding farms that have no phenotypes and only a few phenotyped relatives. This data structure seems to pose convergence problems for predicting genomic breeding values. To check this hypothesis, we simulated such a situation, based on a set of actual phenotype data measured for all farm candidates and genotypes. The simulation consisted of deleting phenotypes of the animals measured on-farm in order to reproduce the data structure encountered for the traits recorded at the FGPorc/INRAE test station in Le Rheu. Phenotypes were then progressively added in different scenarios to identify whether prediction accuracy improved and to estimate the number of phenotypes required. The simulations showed that the unbalanced structure between genotypes and phenotypes was responsible for the computational problems that led to low accuracy of genomic predictions. Phenotyping 12% of all pigs phenotyped at 100 kg each year made it possible to solve the computational problems observed and to recover 61% of the maximum expected accuracy. In conclusion, these results highlight the importance of collecting large-scale phenotypes in the context of genomic selection schemes. Further studies will be conducted to study the impact of genotyping animals measured at the station