A strategy to exploit surrogate sire technology in livestock breeding programs

Background In this work, we performed simulations to develop and test a strategy for exploiting surrogate sire technology in livestock breeding programs.

Methods One hundred replicates of various scenarios were performed. Scenarios followed a common overall structure but differed in the strategy used to identify elite donors and how these donors were used in the product development part.

Results The results of this study showed that using surrogate sire technology would significantly increase the genetic merit of commercial sires, by as much as 6.5 to 9.2 years’ worth of genetic gain compared to a conventional breeding program. The simulations suggested that an identification strategy involving three-stages, the first of which uses genomic selection while the subsequent stages use progeny testing was the most effective strategy of all of those tested.

Conclusions The use of one or a handful of elite donors to generate the production animals would be very different to current practice. While the results demonstrate the great potential of surrogate sire technology there are considerable risks but also other opportunities. Practical implementation of surrogate sire technology would need to account for these.