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Data from: Accurate genomic predictions for chronic wasting disease in North American elk

Seabury, Christopher1; Bhattarai, Eric1; Brun, Marcel1; Johnson, Charles1; Haley, Nicholas2; Mitchell, Gordon3; Nichols, Tracy4

Research facility: Texas A&M University
Published Apr 06, 2026 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.p2ngf1w57

Data files

Abstract

The geographic expansion of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in North American elk (Cervus canadensis) has not been well-mitigated by best management practices, diagnostic surveillance, and depopulation of positive herds. Using a custom Affymetrix Axiom® genetic variant array, we demonstrate that differential susceptibility to CWD is highly heritable ( among farmed North American elk; with loci other than PRNP involved. Genome-wide association analyses using 173,674 quality filtered variants for a geographically diverse cohort of 904 farmed North American elk (n = 357 CWD positive; n = 547 CWD non-detect) confirmed the prion gene (PRNP codon 132 MetàLeu and promoter variants) as a large-effect risk locus (P-value < 5.135E-08), as evidenced by the estimated proportion of phenotypic variance explained (PVE ≥ 0.032). However, more phenotypic variance was collectively explained by loci other than PRNP.** Genomic best linear unbiased prediction (GBLUP; n = 173,674 markers) with k-fold cross validation (k = 3; k = 5) and random sampling (n = 50 iterations) for the same cohort of 904 farmed North American elk produced mean genomic prediction accuracies ≥ 0.791; thereby providing a foundation to explore a genomically-estimated CWD genetic improvement program.