Genomics can deliver great benefits to agricultural breeding programs, including efficient management of diversity and inbreeding, accurate parentage assignment, optimal mating designs, improved breeding value prediction, selection decisions, and breeding strategies. Using the appropriate platform for the population of interest is critical. It is often expected that optimal results require a customized tool with a higher level of initial investment and larger ongoing costs. However, it is possible to keep costs reasonable with optimal outcomes through the creation or use of a collaboratively designed universal genotyping platform.
Collaborative genotyping platform are designed using diverse populations to ensure the core market set has broad utility alongside markers that capture specific population characteristics. Many industry parties can benefit through using such platforms, creating a sample volume to keep costs reasonable and enabling results and outcomes that are easily compared and evaluated. As the platform is updated and improved, the benefit flows to all users.
A successful example of this approach in the livestock domain is widely used Illumina Bovine BeadChip arrays which were collaboratively developed with partners across the USA, Europe, and Australia. The platforms support many genomic applications, across both the dairy and beef industries, where widespread use create high demand keeping the price per sample low. More recent extensions of this concept have been deployed as GeneSeek Genomic Profiler arrays which leverage the continuously developing knowledge base about the genomic structure of a species.
This approach is also proving extremely beneficial for aquaculture species, as exemplified by the creation of a collaborative genotyping platform for L. vannamei shrimp designed using samples from eleven populations. This poster will present the design of the array, validating the array’s results, how to achieve maximal benefit from the array, and the economic impacts of creating and using such genotyping platforms for aquaculture species in general.