Abstract
Genetic selection can accelerate progress of the United States sheep industry, yet it is underutilized by the seedstock sector. Poor reproductive and lamb rearing rates and inconsistent meat quality are two major issues that have limited domestic production of lamb and allowed imports to hold a more favorable market share in the United States. Better understanding of genetic merit for important production traits earlier in a breeding animal’s life, obtained through the use of genomic technology, is one possible way to address these issues. Flock54, a recently developed low density genotype by sequencing panel, provides genotyping data to producers at a price point that encourages wide-spread utilization. The complete capabilities of the data captured by this panel have yet to be fully explored. This project aims to investigate the application of this 1000 marker panel for the determination of genetic variation (heterozygosity) and inbreeding coefficients within a population. Superior Farms producer-members provided 384 sheep tissue or blood samples from which DNA was extracted and sent to Thermo Fisher for Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) using Torrent Suite 5.10. Genetic variation and inbreeding coefficients were successfully calculated for all animals. With the ability to estimate relatedness within a population and call markers for economically important quantitative trait loci and mendelian inherited traits, producer utilization of Flock54 can facilitate accurate genetic selection within the U.S sheep industry.