Quantitative Genetics Model as the Unifying Model for Defining Genomic Relationship and Inbreeding Coefficient

The traditional quantitative genetics model was used as the unifying approach to derive six existing and new definitions of genomic additive and dominance relationships. The theoretical differences of these definitions were in the assumptions of equal SNP effects (equivalent to across-SNP standardization), equal SNP variances (equivalent to within-SNP standardization), and expected or sample SNP additive and dominance variances. The six definitions of genomic additive and dominance relationships on average were consistent with the pedigree relationships, but had individual genomic specificity and large variations not observed from pedigree relationships. These large variations may allow finding least related genomes even within the same family for minimizing genomic relatedness among breeding individuals. The six definitions of genomic relationships generally had similar numerical results in genomic best linear unbiased predictions of additive effects (GBLUP) and similar genomic REML (GREML) estimates of additive heritability. Predicted SNP dominance effects and GREML estimates of dominance heritability were similar within definitions assuming equal SNP effects or within definitions assuming equal SNP variance, but had differences between these two groups of definitions. We proposed a new measure of genomic inbreeding coefficient based on parental genomic co-ancestry coefficient and genomic additive correlation as a genomic approach for predicting offspring inbreeding level. This genomic inbreeding coefficient had the highest correlation with pedigree inbreeding coefficient among the four methods evaluated for calculating genomic inbreeding coefficient in a Holstein sample and a swine sample.