SIRE 2.0: a novel software tool to estimate host genetic variation in infectious disease transmission

Publication Name
Proceedings of 12th World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production (WCGALP) Technical and species orientated innovations in animal breeding, and contribution of genetics to solving societal challenges
Publisher
Wageningen Academic Publishers
ISBN
978-90-8686-940-4
Abstract
Selection of individuals that are genetically less susceptible to infection, less infectious once infected and who recover more quickly, offer an effective and long-lasting way to reduce the incidence and impact of infectious diseases in farmed animal populations. To date, however, genetic evaluations for these underlying host traits has been hampered by a lack of numerical tools capable of estimating them from available data. This paper introduces a new software tool called SIRE 2.0 which is able to estimate breeding values for polygenic susceptibility, infectivity and recoverability from diverse types of individual-level data. A simulation study is carried out to first validate SIRE 2.0, and then the dependency of prediction accuracies (PAs) on various factors is investigated. These, together with analytical expressions for PAs, indicate that SIRE 2.0 can reliably estimate genetic parameters for all three traits and provide insight into associated data requirements.
Year
2023
Category
Book Chapter
Output Tags
Livestock genetics