Improved genetic evaluation of survival using MACE to combine direct and correlated information from yield and functional traits

Objective of this study was to improve the estimation of survival breeding values using multiple-trait across country evaluation procedures to combine direct information with milk, fat and protein yields and functional traits: milk persistency, somatic cell count, fertility (male and female) and calving ease (direct and maternal). A set of bulls was selected from the Austrian Simmental population and their breeding values were deregressed. An Expectation-Maximization REML procedure based on the multiple-trait across country evaluation equations was used to compute genetic (co)variance components among all traits and to predict breeding values.