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HESTEORSK Inbreeding depression in Coldblooded trotters – cold truths on a hot topic

Tildelt: kr 1,2 mill.

Norwegian-Swedish Coldblooded trotters are successfully bred for trotting performance. Intense use of popular stallions has led to a rapid increase in relatedness and inbreeding, and an effective population size of around 50. This implies a risk of inbreeding depression and previous studies showed that this small native population is prone to negative effects of inbreeding. Preserving the health and robustness of the breed by managing inbreeding and genetic defects is important for its popularity, for the trotting industry’s ‘social license to operate’, and the economy of horse owners. We aim to estimate effects of inbreeding on performance, longevity, and fertility traits, detect signatures of deleterious and lethal alleles at high frequency, and devise strategies to manage inbreeding and deleterious alleles. We hypothesize that inbreeding negatively influences performance and fertility in Coldblooded trotters, that there are ancestor specific effects of inbreeding, and that deleterious alleles segregating at high frequency can be identified and thus better managed in the population. We will work with field data and genotype information in four work packages; WP1: estimate effects of pedigree inbreeding on performance and fertility traits in linear mixed models, including specific inbreeding effects of highly contributing ancestors. WP2: select 700 horses for SNP-genotyping from hair samples, to be combined with 600 existing genotypes. WP3: detect candidate lethal alleles by identifying haplotype homozygote deficiency and identify candidate deleterious alleles with negative effects on performance by genome-wide association studies on homozygosity identified as runs of homozygosity. WP4: disseminate results and their implications both scientifically and in popular scientific form to the industries.

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