Estimating age of admixture in a cattle population based on SNP chip data

The aim of this study was to predict individual age of admixture in the crossbred Swiss Fleckvieh population. We checked how well the method is dealing with recent admixture with high throughput single nucleotide polymorphism data from the bovine 50K SNP Chip. A total of 101 Red Holstein, 91 Simmental, and 308 crossed animals were available for analysis. Age of admixture was derived from the complete pedigree and molecular markers. The method applied (using SABER software) based on Markov-hidden Markov model was able to derive age of admixture similar to estimates of pedigree data, however the values were often overestimated. Of 21 investigated cases, results from SNP data reflected paternal and maternal age of admixture well for 9 cases but provided results out of range for the other 12 cases. Alternative methods based on breed-specific haplotype blocks need to be evaluated in the future.