Hence, the performance of a breed or combination of breeds in a given environment or degree of intervention by management to alleviate environmental stressors, are able to be predicted.
Analysis of real data has shown that information from other breeds generally does not increase the prediction accuracy of a given breed at a 50 k marker density in dairy cattle [ 8- 10], beef cattle [ 11] or sheep [ 12, 13].
The degree of admixture or ancestry diversity of each breed was calculated as 1 − Σ qk), where q k is the average fraction of the genetic ancestry of a given breed that belongs to the kth ancestral population, estimated by STRUCTURE analyses [ 23].
Depends on Whom You Ask As in real estate, where a hovel next to an airshaft might be advertised as bursting with potential, there will always be someone eager to sell you on the virtues of a given breed.
Different approaches have been proposed to quantify the importance of a given breed for the conservation of genetic diversity [ 7, 29].
It was also suggested that cryopreserved bio-specimens could be used as a backup material to redirect the selection scheme of a given breed, if needed [ 2, 3].
A methodology to choose donors for a cryobank that are representative of the genetic diversity of a given breed based on results from both genetic and the network analyses was developed.
This result illustrates quite well the fact that in a large dataset, contribution of a given breed to the total diversity depends both on its within diversity and its position within the genetic architecture of the species [ 31, 36, 37].
The same alleles are likely to be segregating in each breed, but the common founder of a given genetic variant is likely to be many generations from the current population.
Finally, it must be stated, that for conservation issues, socio-cultural background is at least as important as effective population size, and should, when possible, be taken into account when assessing the endangerment level of a given breed (e.g., [ 37]).
The question is how the use of data from multiple breeds affects prediction accuracies for a given breed.
