July, 2016

Executive Summary May-June 2016

During May-June 2016 a number of Interbull meetings (eg Interbull-ICAR TF, GenoEX PSE etc.) were held and summarised at an Interbull Steering Committee meeting held by conference call on 28 June 2016, during which the following key decisions were taken:

• Service Calendar 2017

The Interbull Service has been released. It can be found on: http://www.interbull.org/ib/servicecalendar

• Interbull Annual Meeting 2016

The 40^th Biennial ICAR meeting will take place from 24-28 October 2016 in Puerto Varas, Chile. The Interbull Business Meetings and Open Meetings will take place during this event on Monday 24 and Tuesday 25 October. The general programme is available on: www.icar2016.cl/technical/main-program.

The themes for presentations at the Interbull Open Meeting have been announced as:

• 1 - Methods and practical experiences for parentage analysis: With the launch of the GenoEx-PSE during the meeting in Chile we specifically would like to request you to submit presentations in relation to the use of SNP analysis for parentage verification, discovery and microsatellite imputation.

• 2 - New developments in genomic methodologies and evaluation: Presentations within this theme could be related to practical developments within genetic evaluations centers, such as comparison of international vs national reliabilities, or future research developments, such as the one-step genomic evaluation approach.

• 3 - Genetic evaluation of new phenotypes: This theme provides the opportunity to share your experiences, activities and plans on the collection and analysis of novel phenotypes.

• 4 – Developments and needs in animal breeding: Current developments (mainly in genomics) require a large amount of phenotypic and genomic data to be implemented at a national level. Not all countries are able to implement these new techniques due to restrictions in the availability of phenotypes and / or genotypes. This theme provides an opportunity to discuss alternatives (both needs and developments) of making use of the new techniques.

Details for submission of titles and abstracts are available on the Interbull website

• Additional information

Marcus Pedersén joined the Interbull Centre team as a System Administrator.

Genetic evaluation centres may be contacted by Renzo Bonifazi who is an Erasmus student from Italy, working on genomics projects at the Interbull Center for the period from May to September 2016.