Does this sound familiar? You are ready to submit your DNA testing order, and there’s just one more thing to do: enter a sire group for a parentage test — the bulls that make sense based on your records and what you remember from that year. You’re confident one of them will come back as the match. Then, the results arrive … and no match.

So you do what most folks do. You go back through your records, replay breeding moves in your head, and sooner or later end up calling in to see what else can be done. You’re on the phone with a customer service representative, and there comes the dreaded question: Is there another sire we can try? Sometimes there is. Sometimes there really isn’t. 

Parent Match^SM was built for moments like these. Instead of stopping when a sire group doesn’t return a match, Parent Match keeps working for you. It uses DNA results to look for the most qualified matches, so there is less guesswork, fewer phone calls and a clearer next step when things don’t line up.

American Angus Association members ordering Angus GSSM or HD 50K^® through Angus Genetics, Inc. (AGI^®) now have access to Parent Match as a streamlined parent qualification service. This is included at no additional cost when testing.

While still using the same population genetics principles as standalone parent verification, the new Parent Match system takes advantage of a larger set of DNA markers, which are available from genomic profile testing.

Parent verification using single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers are common in the era of modern genotyping technologies. Parent Match works by comparing a calf’s DNA to DNA from potential parents. By looking at thousands of markers across the genome, the system can tell which animals could be a parent and which ones clearly aren’t — based on population genetics inheritance principles. 

From theory to practice

A classic genetic inheritance example involves mating two heterozygous parents at a single gene location, meaning both the sire and dam carry an AB genotype. Because each parent passes only one copy of that gene to their offspring, we can use population genetics and statistics to predict the outcomes with confidence. In this situation, 25% of the offspring are expected to be homozygous AA, 50% heterozygous AB, and 25% homozygous BB (Table 1). This predictable pattern is the basis of Mendelian inheritance and forms the foundation for interpreting DNA test results.

Table 1: Progeny genotype distribution based on parental mating combinations

These inheritance principles also provide powerful tools for parentage qualification. When an individual is homozygous, either AA or BB, it can transmit only that allele to its offspring. An AA animal will always contribute an A allele, while a BB animal will always contribute a B allele. Consequently, matings between two AA parents will produce offspring that are 100% AA, and the same principle applies to matings between two BB parents. See Table 1 for other possible combinations.

These rules allow us to rule out certain parentage scenarios. For example, if the sire is heterozygous AB and the dam is homozygous AA, the resulting calves can only be AA or AB. Half of the offspring will inherit an A from both parents and be AA, while the other half will inherit an A from the dam and a B from the sire, resulting in an AB genotype. The appearance of a BB calf is impossible in this scenario because neither parent can contribute two B alleles.

This principle underlies the use of DNA testing for parentage verification. If a sire is tested and confirmed to be AA, but a calf is found to have a BB genotype, this result is known as an opposing homozygote. Such a finding represents a genetic exclusion or conflict. In simple terms, that individual cannot be the true sire of the calf.

While the exclusion of opposing homozygotes provides a powerful method for identifying impossible parent-offspring relationships, it is important to recognize that matching genotypes can still occur by chance. An animal may appear compatible with a calf at a single genetic marker simply because they share the same alleles, not because they are truly related. This limitation becomes more pronounced when only a small number of markers are evaluated; particularly in large, genotyped populations.

As the size of a genotyped population increases, so does the probability that unrelated animals will share common alleles across a limited marker set. 

In these situations, a smaller marker panel may still avoid obvious genetic conflicts and produce seemingly acceptable results. But it may lack the resolution required to confidently distinguish among multiple potential parents, or to discover true parents across the entire population without generating false-positive assignments.

Upgrading the toolkit

AGI’s Parent Match represents a major advancement in parentage qualification by using thousands of carefully selected and fine-tuned markers, optimized specifically for the Angus population and providing a more robust parent-qualification service. In addition, Parent Match can discover parents by searching the entire database.

Results from testing and validation demonstrate the power of this new technology. During evaluation, Parent Match correctly discovered parents using genotype information alone for 98.5% of animals in a dataset of nearly 75,000 individuals. Of the remaining 1.5%, approximately 0.1% involved animals for which both parents did not have genomic profiles available; 0.7% had only one parent verified, indicating that the other parent did not have a genomic profile; and another 0.7% returned more than two potential parents, for instance, when one of the parents was cloned, resulting in more than one match.

In some cases, discrepancies between Parent Match results and recorded pedigrees can occur. These conflicts may arise from sample swaps, mislabeling of pedigrees or samples, cloning, or not having genomic profiles. For this reason, breeder commitment to accurate recordkeeping and careful review of testing results remains essential. Ultimately, Parent Match is designed to deliver the most complete results possible, giving breeders greater confidence and stronger decision-making power in their genetic selection programs.

To learn more about the new Parent Match by AGI, visit this article and watch the video.