The Impact of Genetic Relationship and Linkage Disequilibrium on Genomic Selection

PLoS One. 2015 Jul 6;10(7):e0132379. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0132379. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Genomic selection is a promising research area due to its practical application in breeding. In this study, impact of realized genetic relationship and linkage disequilibrium (LD) on marker density and training population size required was investigated and their impact on practical application was further discussed. This study is based on experimental data of two populations derived from the same two founder lines (B73, Mo17). Two populations were genotyped with different marker sets at different density: IBM Syn4 and IBM Syn10. A high-density marker set in Syn10 was imputed into the Syn4 population with low marker density. Seven different prediction scenarios were carried out with a random regression best linear unbiased prediction (RR-BLUP) model. The result showed that the closer the real genetic relationship between training and validation population, the fewer markers were required to reach a good prediction accuracy. Taken the short-term cost for consideration, relationship information is more valuable than LD information. Meanwhile, the result indicated that accuracies based on high LD between QTL and markers were more stable over generations, thus LD information would provide more robust prediction capacity in practical applications.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Linkage Disequilibrium*
  • Models, Genetic*
  • Selection, Genetic*
  • Zea mays / genetics*

Grants and funding

Funding for this research was provided by National Natural Science Foundation of China (31201221, 31271740, 31060191); the National Hi-Tech program of China (2012AA10307); Maize Research & Development Center, CARS-02-07; and the Key Laboratory Construction Program of Guangxi (12-071-09). Guangzhou Genedenovo Biotechnology Co., Ltd provided support in the form of salaries for authors HZ and XZ, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.