Comparison of genome-wide association and genomic prediction methods for milk production traits in Korean Holstein cattle.

Objective: The objectives of this study were to compare identified informative regions through two genome-wide association study (GWAS) approaches and determine the accuracy and bias of the direct genomic value (DGV) for milk production traits in Korean Holstein cattle, using two genomic prediction approaches: single-step GBLUP (ss-GBLUP) and Bayesian Bayes-B.

Methods: From 265,271 first parity cows, records on production traits such as adjusted 305-day milk (MY305), fat (FY305), and protein (PY305) yields were collected. After quality control, 50,765 SNP genotypes were available for analysis. In GWAS for ss-GBLUP (ssGWAS) and Bayes-B (BayesGWAS), the proportion of genetic variance for each 1-Mb genomic window was calculated and used to identify informative genomic regions. Accuracy of the DGV was estimated by a five-fold cross-validation with random clustering. As a measure of accuracy for DGV, we also assessed the correlation between DGV and deregressed-estimated breeding value (DEBV). The bias of DGV for each method was obtained by determining regression coefficients.

Results: A total of nine and five significant windows (1 Mb) were identified for MY305 using ssGWAS and BayesGWAS, respectively. Using ssGWAS and BayesGWAS, we also detected multiple significant regions for FY305 (12 & 7) and PY305 (14 & 2), respectively. Both single-step DGV and Bayes DGV also showed somewhat moderate accuracy ranges for MY305 (0.32-0.34), FY305 (0.37-0.39), and PY305 (0.35-0.36) traits, respectively. The mean biases of DGVs determined using the single-step and Bayesian methods were 1.50 ± 0.21 and 1.18 ± 0.26 for MY305, 1.75 ± 0.33 and 1.14 ± 0.20 for FY305, and 1.59 ± 0.20 and 1.14 ± 0.15 for PY305, respectively.

Conclusions: From the bias perspective, we believe that genomic selection based on the application of Bayesian approaches would be more suitable than application of single-step GBLUP in Korean Holstein populations.