First study on genomic prediction using whole genome sequence data published in PLoS Genetics

Members of the working group published a paper in the current issue of PLoS Genetics (Ober et al. 2012). This article is the first utilizing whole genome sequence data for genomic prediction. Two different traits for the model species Drosophila melanogaster were considered and a genomic prediction was established using more than 2.5 million SNPs from 157 inbred lines of the “Drosophila Genetics Reference Panel”, which was recently released as a new community resource for genetics research (Mackay et al. 2012). Important findings are that (i) genomic prediction can be efficiently implemented using sequence data via genomic best linear unbiased prediction, (ii) there is little gain in predictive ability if the number of SNPs is increased above 150,000, and (iii) neither implicit nor explicit marker selection substantially improves the predictive ability.

The full article is available here:
http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1002685