What are advantages of BLUP breeding values?

- More accurate - reduces error variance as it shrinks the values towards the means.

o When there is a lot of unexplained variation in a trial, BLUEs will be spread out in both directions from high to low away from the trial mean but BLUPs will not which is more accurate.

o If the mean heritability is very low, all of the BLUPs will be shrunk toward the mean and will have the same value, which is the trial mean, more accurate.

Wahid Awad - CSU