Opportunities and challenges of phenomics applied to livestock and aquaculture breeding in South America

Abstract

South America is a major food producer in the world, but there is still a large potential to optimize production effciency and the industries' long-term sustainability through the incorporation of modern phenotyping technologies, advanced breeding schemes, and better management strategies. There is a great diversity of livestock production systems (e.g., pasture-based, mountainous regions, feedlots) in South America, which makes it more challenging to collect certain phenotypes and also requires accounting for genotype-by-environment interactions in genetic evaluation models. There is a lack of large-scale and well-structured breeding programs for the majority of livestock and aquaculture species, mainly due to the low investments in pedigree recording, genotyping, and highthroughput phenotyping in commercial and small holder farms. As phenotype and pedigree recording and genotyping are still challenging in South America, data sharing across breeding associations and research institutions is paramount, especially for building training populations for genomic selection.