2. Principles of Estimation of Breeding Values

The most obvious piece of phenotypic information we can use to estimate an animal’s breeding value is the animal’s own phenotype. But we can also use information from relatives, such as the sire, the dam, siblings and progeny. Commercial genetic evaluation systems produce EBVs for each animal for all traits of relevance. Such an evaluation is based on a statistical procedure leading to Best Linear Unbiased Prediction (BLUP) of breeding values. Inclusion of information from relatives is automatically taken care of in the BLUP method, provided such information is available in the database through the knowledge of pedigree. We will discuss the BLUP procedure in greater detail in later topics.