Genomic Prediction
One of the ultimate goals of genomic research is the ability to accurately predict phenotype from genotype. Achieving this goal will significantly improve how medical professionals assess, manage, and treat human disease risk. Achieving the ability to predict phenotype from genotype will also significantly increase the efficiency and success of genetic selection for plant and animal breeding in agriculture. We have contributed to this goal by developing an improved method for deriving kinship with the realized relationship based on molecular genetic markers. Our method is superior because it accounts for differences, such as segregation distortion, that were previously ignored by conventional pedigree-based kinship methods. We added a subroutine, named MTDF-ARM, to a well known statistical software package (MTDFREML) that performs an Arbitrary Relationship Matrix (ARM) for deriving genetic marker-based kinship information (Zhang et al., Journal of Animal Science, 2007). Later, this approach became well known as genomic BLUP, or simply gBLUP.