Validation of the Prediction Accuracy for 13 Traits in Chinese Simmental Beef Cattle Using a Preselected Low-Density SNP Panel.

Chinese Simmental beef cattle play a key role in the Chinese beef industry due to their great adaptability and marketability. To achieve efficient genetic gain at a low breeding cost, it is crucial to develop a customized cost-effective low-density SNP panel for this cattle population. Thirteen growth, carcass, and meat quality traits and a BovineHD Beadchip genotyping of 1346 individuals were used to select trait-associated variants and variants contributing to great genetic variance. In addition, highly informative SNPs with high MAF in each 500 kb sliding window and in each genic region were also included separately. A low-density SNP panel consisting of 30,684 SNPs was developed, with an imputation accuracy of 97.4% when imputed to the 770 K level. Among 13 traits, the average prediction accuracy levels evaluated by genomic best linear unbiased prediction (GBLUP) and BayesA/B/Cπ were 0.22-0.47 and 0.18-0.60 for the ~30 K array and BovineHD Beadchip, respectively. Generally, the predictive performance of the ~30 K array was trait-dependent, with reduced prediction accuracies for seven traits. While differences in terms of prediction accuracy were observed among the 13 traits, the low-density SNP panel achieved moderate to high accuracies for most of the traits and even improved the accuracies for some traits.