Executive Summary from the Interbull Steering Committee

The Interbull Steering Committee (SC) held a web-phone conference on February 4, 2014, and this is the summary of the decisions.

Methodology to be adopted in the Feb 2014 GMACE test run

Interbull carried out a pilot GMACE study in December 2013 to define which reliabilities should be used for GMACE in practice. The objectives of the pilot study were:

Develop prediction equations to regress national reliabilities toward a globally standardized set of expectations.
Study the merits of predicted (fully regressed) reliabilities, partially regressed reliabilities, or the provided (not regressed) reliabilities in GMACE.
Investigate the option of a GMACE model that does not include variance estimation.
Carry out cross-validation tests to compare the different approaches.

Considering the input from participating countries and the Interbull Technical Committee (ITC), the SC decided to adopt the methodology which does not include a genomic variance estimation step and estimate the genomic reliabilities as a combination of predicted reliabilities and the national reliabilities provided by the users. This option is referred to as MP.5, and will be adopted as the official method in the February 2014 GMACE test run, as well as in the April and August 2014 runs.

Bull controlling country

The SC has decided to request additional information from the service users regarding which bulls are controlled by companies/stud within the area of influence of each country participating in Interbull international comparisons (MACE & GMACE). This information will have strategic use for interpreting all types of results distributed by Interbull and it will play an important role on the GMACE publication policy. The steps to be taken are the following:

All countries sending data for GMACE have the option to send a list of bulls which they claim to have the control over until Feb 28, 2014.
The lists received will be merged and made available to all participating countries, shortly after data reception, allowing potential conflicts to be resolved before distribution.
For bulls included in the supplied controlling country list, publication status declared by the controlling country will take preference regardless of publication status in other countries.
The previously distributed ”ownership” list will be renamed as ”publication status" list and will contain a list of bulls which comply with the following criteria for the controlling country:
1. Status of bull = 10 (AI bull)
2. Publication status = Y (bull meets the national standards for official publication)
For any bull not included in any user-supplied controlling country file, the bull will be considered publishable in routine runs if at least one GEBV record included in GMACE, for any population and any trait, has
1. Status of bull = 10 (AI bull)
2. Publication status = Y (bull meets the national standards for official publication)
Given that the Feb 2014 GMACE test run determines which changes can be implemented in both the April and August runs the publication policy adopted by participating countries must reflect the national policy to be adopted in both following runs.

Official adoption of GMACE

Because the February 2014 GMACE test run is the first official run adopting the method MP.5, the SC has decided that the April 2014 GMACE run will also be considered as an implementation run. These are the features of implementation runs:

Implementation runs are Interbull evaluations used to introduce a completely new procedure into service and serves as a transition between a successful test run and the first official routine run using the introduced change in the services.
Implementation runs follow the same calendar, turnaround time and distribution policy as the official routine runs that will adopt the procedure implemented afterwards.
Publication of implementation runs results in national scales is facultative and should follow the national strategy to communicate the changes introduced internally.
Service users that decide to publish implementation run results must indicate that GMACE values are from an implementation run.

The SC also decided that the August 2014 GMACE run will be the first GMACE routine run, unless major technical impediments happen to occur.
For publication of the results from implementation runs and routine runs please see: CoP Appendix V: Publication guidelines
Considering the considerable resources already applied into GMACE runs, the SC has decided to keep the service fee update for 2014 as previously proposed (SC Executive Summary - Jan 2014).

2014 ICAR/Interbull Conference

The 2014 Interbull Meeting will be held in conjunction with the 39th ICAR Session and the IDF/ISO Analytical Week in Berlin, Germany. The early bird registration is February 16, 2014 and the call for titles for the Interbull Open sessions is open until March 16, 2014. More details in the EVENT PAGE.