| During 1960 to 1989, the University of Alberta Kinsella Research Ranch had established synthetic beef breeds as a cost-effective crossbreeding system. Animals from these synthetics were subsequently pooled to form a composite population. Despite many breeding and genomic studies on this population, little is known about its genetic structure. This thesis provided the first genome-wide survey of linkage disequilibrium (LD) at both gametic and zygotic levels for the Kinsella population. The survey was based on the genomic data consisting of 1,023 animals genotyped for 50K SNP markers. Similar genomic structures in gametic and zygotic LD were observed, with zygotic LD decaying faster than gametic LD over marker distance. The high-order trigenic and quadrigenic disequilibria were insignificant and decayed rapidly within a very short marker distance. These results support the current intensive focus on use of high-density markers for fine-scale mapping and genomic selection in the Kinsella population. |
