The superiority of multi-trait models with genotype-by-environment interactions in a limited number of environments for genomic prediction in pigs

Background Different production systems and climates could lead to genotype-by-environment (G x E) interactions between populations, and the inclusion of G x E interactions is becoming essential in breeding decisions. The objective of this study was to investigate the performance of multi-trait models in genomic prediction in a limited number of environments with G x E interactions. Results In total, 2,688 and 1,384 individuals with growth and reproduction phenotypes, respectively, from two Yorkshire pig populations with similar genetic backgrounds were genotyped with the PorcineSNP80 panel. Single- and multi-trait models with genomic best linear unbiased prediction (GBLUP) and BayesC pi were implemented to investigate their genomic prediction abilities with 20 replicates of five-fold cross-validation. Our results regarding between-environment genetic correlations of growth and reproductive traits (ranging from 0.618 to 0.723) indicated the existence of G x E interactions between these two Yorkshire pig populations. For single-trait models, genomic prediction with GBLUP was only 1.1% more accurate on average in the combined population than in single populations, and no significant improvements were obtained by BayesC pi for most traits. In addition, single-trait models with either GBLUP or BayesC pi produced greater bias for the combined population than for single populations. However, multi-trait models with GBLUP and BayesC pi better accommodated G x E interactions, yielding 2.2% - 3.8% and 1.0% - 2.5% higher prediction accuracies for growth and reproductive traits, respectively, compared to those for single-trait models of single populations and the combined population. The multi-trait models also yielded lower bias and larger gains in the case of a small reference population. The smaller improvement in prediction accuracy and larger bias obtained by the single-trait models in the combined population was mainly due to the low consistency of linkage disequilibrium between the two populations, which also caused the BayesC pi method to always produce the largest standard error in marker effect estimation for the combined population. Conclusions In conclusion, our findings confirmed that directly combining populations to enlarge the reference population is not efficient in improving the accuracy of genomic prediction in the presence of G x E interactions, while multi-trait models perform better in a limited number of environments with G x E interactions.