Feed efficiency in sheep Santa Inês in genomic approach

Abstract

Brazil is known as a major producer and exporter of beef, pork and poultry. However, sheep production has no significant participation in the meat sector, even being an important species to regions of the country, like the Cerrado. Consumption of lamb and mutton has increased significantly (53%) from 2005 to 2013. Improving feed efficiency is an alternative to increase production and make the sheep industry more attractive to producers and less costly to consumers. Feed efficiency is a significant component because it has an effect (greater than 50%) on production cost. It also has a direct impact on the environment (more effective animals produce less methane), which has become the focus of projects. Animal breeding is a tool to improve this trait, among other tools available. However, classical animal breeding is restricted in feed efficiency, because measuring this trait is costly and difficult. Genomic information is an alternative to overcome this deadlock. For many species, quantitative-genomic studies on feed efficiency have been developed, however, there are not many studies in the literature for sheep. In this sense, this project used genomic approaches to feed efficiency in Santa Ines sheep, since we were unable to find works in the literature for studies on genetic markers for feed efficiency in sheep, in national and international breeds. It is also proposed to calculate the LD for Santa Ines to support the genomics approach and afterward perform a genome-wide association in order to relate SNPs with genes of interest (feed efficiency) under a Bayesian approach and predict genomic breeding values. (AU)