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 an in-depth analysis of the pedigree of the Canadian sheep breeds 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, Polypay (PO), Rideau-Arcott, Romanov (RV), and Suffolk, 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 nonfounders, and effective number of ancestors were estimated. The completeness and depth of the Canadian sheep pedigree datasets were reasonably high, with <20% parental information missing. More attention should be given to PO breed, which was found to have the smallest effective population size (55), and RV breed, which had the highest average level of inbreeding (4.8%). Techniques such as optimum contribution selection and minimum coancestry mating could be used to minimize the inbreeding of future generations, while maintaining genetic progress at a desirable level.