Assessing genetic diversity of various Canadian sheep breeds through pedigree analyses

The loss of genetic variability in a population will drastically affect the success of a breeding program by reducing selection response and fitness and, consequently, affecting reproduction, resilience and production efficiency. The objective of this study was to perform in-depth pedigree analyses of the Canadian sheep breeds in order to assess the levels of inbreeding, effective population size and other metrics of genetic diversity, which included the five most important sheep breeds in Canada: Dorset (DR), Polypay (PO), Rideau-Arcott (RI), Romanov (RV), and Suffolk (SU), using a large dataset (1,336,926 animals). As measures of genetic diversity, effective population size, inbreeding coefficient, effective number of founders, effective number of founder genomes, effective number of non-founders, and effective number of ancestors were estimated. The completeness and depth of the Canadian sheep pedigree datasets were reasonably high, with less than 20% parental information missing. More attention should...