What do I need to use TGRM™?

To use TGRM™ you need the following:

An Accredited TGRM™ Service Provider:

Using TGRM™ requires a good knowledge and understanding of genetic principles. This includes understanding BLUP (Best Linear Unbiased Prediction) EBVs, inbreeding and it’s consequences, how inbreeding and BLUP are related, and the importance of a well-defined breeding objective. For this reason, TGRM™ is delivered to livestock breeders through trained and accredited service providers who have the appropriate skills, training and education in animal breeding theory, or by X'Prime where we have extensive experience with TGRM™. The service provider's role is to help you achieve quality outcomes with TGRM™ and to assist you extracting the best possible value from TGRM™ for your business. TGRM™ Consultants will run your analysis for you, with you, and with considerable input from you during the analysis. The end result is a hardcopy or softcopy report provided to you by your consultant.

A well-defined breeding goal:

TGRM™ maximises genetic gain on a multiple-trait selection index that represents the breeding objective or goal of the breeding program. Secondary traits that may be difficult to include in the breeding objective (it may be difficult to calculate economic values for these traits) can also be selected upon with TGRM. Traits can have minimum or maximum limits imposed, or they can be driven towards an optimal value.

Access to database with pedigree, EBV and Index values:

It is best to use the full pedigree history of individuals that are available for selection. This information is used by TGRM™ to calculate inbreeding coefficients and to predict the coancestry of the breeding population. Coancestry is a measure of the relationships among individuals and is highly related to the rate of inbreeding.

TGRM™ can interface effectively with pedigree and EBV databases. TGRM™ does this specifically to prepare data files in an appropriate format for TGRM™ analyses and to avoid as much as possible errors introduced in the data preparation step. Database interfacing may be available for your industry, and details may be found in the industry specific section for TGRM™.

With or without direct database interfacing, TGRM™ assumes traits are heritable and generally available as Estimated Breeding Values (EBVs). Traits are combined into a selection index (see above) and TGRM™ maximises this index while keeping coancestry to a minimum. If you do not have a multiple trait index but you do have EBVs, you can combine your EBVs as part of the data setup step. You should have index coefficients ready to use or seek the advice of an animal breeding consultant.

Including gene marker information:

Genes for which there are observations from which inference can be made, or when there are gene markers available from which inference can be made, can be included in TGRM™. Segregation analysis is required in order to obtain the probabilities for each of 3 genotypes (assuming a bi-allelic model). These probabilities can be included for selection to increase one allele in TGRM™