TITLE:
Genetic Diversity and Ancestral History of the German Angler and the Red-and-White Dual-Purpose Cattle Breeds Assessed through Pedigree Analysis
AUTHORS:
Sowah Addo, Jonas Schäler, Dirk Hinrichs, Georg Thaller
KEYWORDS:
Ancestral Inbreeding, Effective Population Size, Pedigree Analysis, Genetic Diversity, Local Cattle
JOURNAL NAME:
Agricultural Sciences,
Vol.8 No.9,
September
22,
2017
ABSTRACT: Local cattle breeds continue to decline in numbers partly due to the use of high performing breeds in advanced production systems where genetic material of elite animals is widely spread. The objective of this study was to assess the within and across breed genetic diversity of the Angler and Red-and-White dual-purpose (DP) cattle breeds applying different inbreeding concepts. Classical and ancestral inbreeding coefficients were computed from pedigree data using the gene dropping method. Effective population size was calculated based on the increase of classical inbreeding, and based on ancestral inbreeding to obtain what was termed as ancestral effective population size. Furthermore, the effective number of founders and ancestors were computed to assess the disequilibrium of founder contribution in the reference populations. The analyses were performed separately for each breed and for a combined dataset. The Angler pedigree was more complete (88%) in the first parental generation but completeness declined with increasing pedigree depth. Average classical inbreeding coefficients of inbred individuals were 2.19%, 1.94% and 2.07%, while average Ballou’s ancestral inbreeding coefficients were 3.69%, 1.39% and 2.21% for the Angler, Red-and-White DP and the combined breed pedigree analyses, respectively. Ancestral history coefficient is a novel coefficient and its estimates were similar and strongly correlated to Ballou’s coefficients (r = 0.99, p