Ellen Esther D, Muir William M, Teuscher Friedrich, Bijma Piter
Animal Breeding and Genomics Centre, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands.
Genetics. 2007 May;176(1):489-99. doi: 10.1534/genetics.106.069542. Epub 2007 Apr 3.
Livestock populations are usually kept in groups. As a consequence, social interactions among individuals affect productivity, health, and welfare. Current selection methods (individual selection), however, ignore those interactions and yield suboptimal or in some cases even negative responses. In principle, selection between groups instead of individuals offers a solution, but has rarely been adopted in practice for two reasons. First, the relationship between group selection theory and common animal breeding concepts, such as the accuracy of selection, is unclear. Second, application of group selection requires keeping selection candidates in groups, which is often undesirable in practice. This work has two objectives. First, we derive expressions for the accuracy of individual and group selection, which provides a measurement of quality for those methods. Second, we investigate the opportunity to improve traits affected by interactions by using information on relatives kept in family groups, while keeping selection candidates individually. The accuracy of selection based on relatives is shown to be an analogy of the classical expression for traits not affected by interactions. Our results show that selection based on relatives offers good opportunities for effective genetic improvement of traits affected by interactions.
家畜群体通常成群饲养。因此，个体之间的社会互动会影响生产力、健康和福利。然而，当前的选择方法（个体选择）忽略了这些互动，导致产生次优的反应，在某些情况下甚至产生负面反应。原则上，群体间而非个体间的选择提供了一种解决方案，但在实践中很少被采用，原因有两个。第一，群体选择理论与常见的动物育种概念（如选择准确性）之间的关系尚不清楚。第二，应用群体选择需要将候选选择个体成群饲养，这在实践中往往不可行。这项工作有两个目标。第一，我们推导了个体选择和群体选择准确性的表达式，这为这些方法提供了质量衡量标准。第二，我们研究了在将候选选择个体单独饲养的同时，利用家庭群体中亲属的信息来改善受互动影响的性状的机会。基于亲属的选择准确性被证明是不受互动影响性状的经典表达式的类推。我们的结果表明，基于亲属的选择为受互动影响的性状进行有效的遗传改良提供了良好机会。
