Re-Evaluation of Genotyping Methodologies in Cattle: The Proficiency of Imputation

In dairy cattle, identifying polymorphisms that contribute to complex economical traits such as residual feed intake (RFI) is challenging and demands accurate genotyping. In this study, we compared imputed genotypes (n = 192 cows) to those obtained using the TaqMan and high-resolution melting (HRM) methods (n = 114 cows), for mutations in the FABP4 gene that had been suggested to have a large effect on RFI. Combining the whole genome sequence (n = 19 bulls) and the cows’ BovineHD BeadChip allowed imputing genotypes for these mutations that were verified by Sanger sequencing, whereas, an error rate of 11.6% and 10.7% were encountered for HRM and TaqMan, respectively. We show that this error rate seriously affected the linkage-disequilibrium analysis that supported this gene candidacy over other BTA14 gene candidates. Thus, imputation produced superior genotypes and should also be regarded as a method of choice to validate the reliability of the genotypes obtained by other methodologies that are prone to genotyping errors due to technical conditions. These results support the view that RFI is a complex trait and that searching for the causative sequence variation underlying cattle RFI should await the development of statistical methods suitable to handle additive and epistatic interactions.