Using genomic tools to maintain diversity and fitness in conservation programmes

Conservation programmes aim at maximising the survival probability of populations, by minimising the loss of genetic diversity, which allows populations to adapt to changes, and controlling inbreeding increases. The best known strategy to achieve these goals is optimising the contributions of the parents, to minimise global coancestry in their offspring. Results on neutral scenarios showed that management based on molecular coancestry could maintain more diversity than management based on genealogical coancestry when a large number of markers is available. However, if the population has deleterious mutations, managing using optimal contributions can lead to a decrease in fitness, especially using molecular coancestry, because both beneficial and harmful alleles are maintained, compromising the long-term viability of the population. We introduce here two strategies to avoid this problem: The first one uses molecular coancestry calculated removing markers with low minor allele frequencies...