Simulation Study on Parentage Analysis with SNPs in the Japanese Black Cattle Population

Parentage tests using polymorphic DNA marker are commonly performed to avoid incorrect recording of the parental information of livestock animals, and single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are becoming the method of choice. In Japanese Black cattle, parentage tests based on the exclusion method using microsatellite markers are currently conducted; however, an alternative SNP system aimed at parentage tests has recently been developed. In the present study, two types of simulations were conducted using the pedigree data of two subpopulations in the breed (subpopulations of Hyogo and Shimane prefectures) in order to examine the effect of actual genetic and breeding structures. The first simulation (simulation 1) investigated the usefulness of SNPs for excluding a close relative of the true sire; the second one (simulation 2) investigated the accuracy of sire identification tests for multiple full-sib putative sires by a combined method of exclusion and paternity assignment based on the LOD score. The success rates of excluding a single full-sib and sire of the true sires were, respectively, 0.9915 and 0.9852 in Hyogo and 0.9848 and 0.9852 in Shimane, when 50 SNPs with minor allele frequency (MAF: q) of 0.25 <= q <= 0.35 were used in simulation 1. The success rates of sire identification tests based solely on the exclusion method were relatively low in simulation 2. However, assuming that 50 SNPs with MAF of 0.25 <= q <= 0.35 or 0.45 <= q <= 0.5 were available, the total success rates including achievements due to paternity assignment were, respectively, 0.9430 and 0.9681 in Hyogo and 0.8999 and 0.9399 for Shimane, even when each true sire was assumed to compete with 50 full-sibs.