Faculty of Technical Sciences

Genomic selection has offered a new paradigm for livestock breeding within purebred populations, but it also offers greater opportunities for incorporating information from crossbred individuals and selection for crossbred performance. Wei and van der Werf (1994) presented a model for genetic evaluation using information from both purebred and crossbred animals for a two-breed crossbreeding system. The model provides breeding values for both purebred and crossbred performances. However, an extension of that model to incorporate genomic data has not been made yet. Here, a single-step method for genomic evaluation of both purebred and crossbred performances is presented. The model is on the one hand a reformulation and extension of the model by Wei van der Werf (1994), and on the other hand it extends previously studied genomic models for crossbred animals to include phenotypes on purebred animals and incorporate information on non-genotyped animals