Abstract: Beef bull selection is the core of beef cattle breeding. Traditional breeding of beef bulls requires progeny testing, which has the advantages of high accuracy, however, it has the problems of long cycle for breeding, difficult to collect the slaughter and meat quality traits, and high cost, resulting in low selection efficiency. Since the concept of genomic selection was put forward in 2001, it has quickly become a hot spot in animal and plant breeding. When genomic selection was used to select the beef bulls, it can select individuals at early age, greatly shorten the generation interval, improve the prediction accuracy of low heritability traits such as reproduction traits, accelerate the genetic progress, and greatly reduce the breeding cost. In 2014, the American Angus Association began to apply the genomic selection technology, and other developed countries in Europe and the United States also successively used it. Beef cattle breeding entered the genomic era. Since 2017, China began to use the genomic selection technology to select young beef bulls. In 2020, this technology was implemented for national beef cattle genomic evaluation. The current situation of genetic evaluation in China and abroad was summarized in this article, which was respected to provide references for beef cattle breeding in China.

Key words: beef cattle, genetic evaluation, comprehensive selection index, genomic selection