A Causality Perspective of Genomic Breed Composition for Composite Animals

Genomic breed composition (GBC) of an individual animal refers to the partition of its genome according to the inheritance from its ancestors or ancestral breeds. For crossbred or composite animals, knowing their GBC is useful to estimate heterosis, to characterize their actual inheritance from foundation breeds, and to make management decisions for crossbreeding programs. Various statistical approaches have been proposed to estimate GBC in animals, but the interpretations of estimates have varied with these methods. In the present study, we proposed a causality interpretation of GBC based on path analysis. We applied this method to estimating GBC in two composite breeds of beef cattle, namely Brangus and Beefmaster. Three SNP panels were used to estimate GBC: a 10K SNP panel consisting of 10,226 common SNPs across three GeneSeek Genomic Profiler (GGP) bovine SNP arrays (GGP 30K, GGP 40K, and GGP 50K), and two subsets (1K and 5K) of uniformly distributed SNPs. The path analysis decomposed the relationships between the ancestors and the composite animals into direct and indirect path effects, and GBC was measured by the relative ratio of the coefficients of direct (D-GBC) and combined (C-GBC) effects from each ancestral breed to the progeny, respectively. Estimated GBC varied only slightly between different genotyping platforms and between the three SNP panels. In the Brangus cattle, because the two ancestral breeds had a very distant relationship, the estimated D-GBC and C-GBC were comparable to each other in the path analysis, and they corresponded roughly to the estimated GBC from the linear regression and the admixture model. In the Beefmaster, however, the strong relationship in allelic frequencies between Hereford and Shorthorn imposed a challenge for the linear regression and the admixture model to estimated GBC reliably. Instead, D-GBC by the path analysis included only direct ancestral effects, and it was robust to bias due to high genomic correlations between reference (ancestral) breeds.