Effects of pedigree errors on the efficiency of conservation decisions.docVIP

Genetics Selection Evolution BioMedCentral Research Open Access Effects of pedigree errors on the efficiency of conservation decisions Pieter A Oliehoek* and Piter Bijma Address: Animal Breeding and Genomic Centre, Wageningen University, Wageningen, Gelderland, the Netherlands Email: Pieter A Oliehoek* - gse@; Piter Bijma - Piter.Bijma@wur.nl * Corresponding author Published: 14 January 2009 Received: 22 December 2008 Accepted: 14 January 2009 Genetics Selection Evolution 2009, 41:9 doi:10.1186/1297-9686-41-9 This article is available from: /content/41/1/9 ? 2009 Oliehoek and Bijma; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Conservation schemes often aim at increasing genetic diversity by minimizing kinship, and the best method to achieve this goal, when pedigree data is available, is to apply optimal contributions. Optimal contributions calculate contributions per animal so that the weighted average mean kinship among candidate parents is minimized. This approach assumes that pedigree data is correct and complete. However, in practice, pedigrees often contain errors: parents are recorded incorrectly or even missing. We used simulations to investigate the effect of these two types of errors on minimizing kinship. Our findings show that a low percentage of wrong parent information reduces the effect of optimal contributions. When the percentage of wrong parent information is above 15%, the population structure and type of errors, should be taken into account before applying optimal contributions. Optimal contributions based on pedigrees with missing parent information hampers conservation of genetic diversity; however, missing parent information can be