Genomic analysis of the inbreeding load for body weight, carcass and reproductive traits in the Rubia Gallega beef cattle population

This study demonstrates that the inbreeding load variance is low compared to the additive genetic variance across a range of growth, carcass, and reproductive traits. The results were also consistent with a previous study that theoretically demonstrated a negative correlation between additive effects and inbreeding load. The potential to purge deleterious alleles appears limited, largely due to the low prediction accuracy observed in young individuals. Nevertheless, the higher accuracy of inbreeding-load estimates in ancestral animals could still be exploited to guide the unavoidable inbreeding in small populations through informed mating strategies, thereby minimizing undesirable inbreeding-depression effects. The heterogeneous genomic distribution of the inbreeding load suggests new opportunities for identifying genes in which deleterious or semideleterious alleles may be located.