GENM - Génomique

Methodological approaches and applications of geneomic selection in dairy cattle – AMASGEN

Submission summary

The AMASGEN project fits in sub-axis C of the thematic axis « Animal genomics » of the ANR-Génomique call for proposals. It explicitly aims at bringing to the forefront the most recent genomic approaches to enhance and extend the marker assisted selection methods currently used in dairy cattle. The objective is to reinforce the French competitiveness in terms of dairy breeding and genetics by helping it to remain in the leading group of countries with marker assisted selection programmes. In an extremely competitive market at the international level, this requires the in-house elaboration of powerful statistical and computing tools for the prediction of the additive genetic value of bulls and cows at birth from genomic information now available through high density high throughput SNP chips (here, the Illumina BovineSNP50 BeadChip). For this, the genotypes of 3300 tested bulls from the three main French dairy breeds are available in April 2008. The main methodological challenge is the development of a reliable and robust approach for the prediction of “genomic breeding values” in a context where the number of available SNP predictors is considerably larger than the number of phenotypes. In addition, the new approaches should take advantage of the French know-how related to marker assisted selection by optimally including in these genomic evaluations the knowledge about the existence and the position of known QTL with a large effect. In parallel, these evolutions must be considered to enhance the national genetic evaluations and not to discredit them – which would be the case if we do not pay attention to it. The five tasks of this project include these different aspects: development of a methodology to predict genetic values from genomic information and study of its robustness, derivation of prediction equations and creation of a SNP chip for genomic selection, validation on cows genotyped with this chip, combination of genomic evaluation with existing genetic evaluations (marker-assisted evaluations, then "classical" national evaluations), study of the effect of genomic selection on the properties of national and international genetic evaluations. This research project is strongly supported by the French cattle breeding professionals, represented here by the National Union of Breeding and Artificial Insemination Cooperatives (UNCEIA).

Project coordination

Vincent DUCROCQ (Organisme de recherche)

The author of this summary is the project coordinator, who is responsible for the content of this summary. The ANR declines any responsibility as for its contents.

Partner

Help of the ANR 286,738 euros
Beginning and duration of the scientific project: - 36 Months

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