Phenomes: the current frontier in animal breeding.

Area of Science:

• Animal breeding and genetics
• Bioinformatics
• Agricultural technology

Background:

• Genomic selection has advanced significantly, enabling industry-scale applications.
• Further increases in marker density offer diminishing returns for genetic prediction accuracy.
• Identifying causative mutations is crucial for substantial genomic gains.

Purpose of the Study:

• To highlight the shift in focus from genomics to phenomics for future advancements in animal breeding.
• To discuss the potential of phenomics, driven by sensor technology and artificial intelligence, to address industry challenges.
• To identify statistical and computational challenges in phenomics research.

Main Methods:

• Leveraging advancements in sensor technology and artificial intelligence for data collection and analysis.
• Addressing statistical challenges including penalization and dimension reduction for high-dimensional phenomic data.
• Utilizing precision livestock technologies for continuous, large-scale trait data collection.

Main Results:

• Phenomics offers a path to address societal demands like animal welfare and resource efficiency.
• The integration of high-dimensional phenomic data presents statistical and computational challenges, including data heterogeneity and missingness.
• Precision livestock technologies will enable the collection of hundreds of traits from numerous animals continuously.

Conclusions:

• Phenomics, rather than genomics alone, presents the next frontier for scientific disruption and industry relevance in animal breeding.
• Redesigning breeding schemes to incorporate high-dimensional phenomics is key to unlocking future revolutions.
• Phenomics data will significantly enhance our understanding of the biological basis of animal phenotypes.