By George Wiggans, Leigh Walton, and Paul VanRaden
Recently received genotypes will be processed each week to generate approximate genomic evaluations for new animals. Files will be posted each Tuesday morning.
The files will include preliminary genomic evaluations for new animals and for animals with genotypes that became usable since the previous weekly evaluation (for example, because of corrected pedigrees). For the convenience of recipients, the CSV files will contain the same columns as the monthly files, but data for reliability and some other columns will be left blank. Processing time will be minimized by not calculating reliability and using an approximation in the step where genomic values are combined with traditional parent average or PTA. This difference along with month-to-month changes in imputation, pedigree, and estimates of effects for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) will result in some differences between the preliminary and following month’s genomic evaluations, but correlations are very high. The immediacy of the preliminary evaluations provides an incentive to smooth the workload by submitting genotypes throughout the month rather than submitting most at the monthly due date. Another major benefit is to allow earlier sale or culling of animals (or embryos) not needed for breeding purposes to minimize the expense of raising newborn calves.