Interbull Business Meeting Minutes

La Cité Nantes Events Center (Nantes, France) August 23, 16:00-18:00 and August 25, 14:00-15:30

First Business Meeting (August 23, 2013)

1. Opening

Reinhard Reents, Interbull chairman, opened the meeting welcoming everybody to the first Interbull business meeting and thanking the organizers for their great work. This year is a special year for the Interbull community as it turns 30 years of activity. The chairman briefly presented the program of the following days: two business meetings, one and a half day for the open meeting with very interesting presentations and a Steering Committee meeting which will then conclude the Interbull meeting.

2. Adoption of agenda

The agenda was adopted in its entirety, no other matters arised.

3. Interbull Center Annual Report

• 3a. Activities

Joao Durr, Interbull Centre director, presented all the activities done at the Interbull Centre from June 2012 until now. He also took the opportunity to congratulates all the participants for the important milestone reached by the Interbull community: its 30 years of activity. To celebrate it Interbull Center had prepared a blog with information about the community, the Pioneers who had made this possible and pictures of past events.

• 3b. Work plans
• 3c. Financial Accounts

Erling Strandberg, Interbull Centre Secretary, presented the budget: the final budget for the year 2012 was positive even if less than what was estimated to be in Cork. The main difference between estimated and real costs for year 2012 was due to overheads costs, last year's projection considered less overheads costs than what have actually been.

For the year 2013 the projected income is higher than what was estimated last year due to an increase in the service fee and an increase in participation to the Intergenomic service. It is expected that the income due to the service fee will continue to increase in the 2014 due to the possibility of some new countries joining the service.

The budget/projected costs for the year 2013 are very similar. In 2014 there will be the termination of two contracts: the contract with Gerald Jansen as consultant and the Noth America Consortium. The overall balance for 2013 still remains negative although less than what was budgeted last year. Erling pointed out that the income from GMACE has not been included in the overall budget for 2013 as the decision to proceed or not with it was not clear at the time when the budgets were prepared.

Brian Van Doormal, delegate from Canada, expressed a concern about the high overheads costs: although Interbull Centre benefits from being located within SLU through the grants that it receives, the high office rent and overhead that it is required to pay back due to its connection with SLU takes away the benefit of receiving the SLU grants. Maybe it is time that Interbull Centre finds its own facility outside SLU or find a way to compensate the high overhead costs due to its affiliation with SLU.

Erling explained that a discussion is currently going on with the SLU central administration trying to make them understand that Interbull Center cannot be considered as a faculty body but a service provider and underlying all the benefits that SLU itself gets from hosting the Centre. Although they have not reached a decision they are anyhow willing to consider exceptions for the overheads that will led to a decrease in their costs and to provide more grants to Interbull Centre for its role as EU reference labotory.

Reinhard Reents also commented that the Steering Committee will provide an official letter to Erling and Joao to be presented at the Central administration. He also reminded the audience that interbull centre's employees are also SLU employees which is important as a layability within SLU's insurance.

Daniel Gianola from USA reminded that although Interbull Center is a service provider it aslo gather strength from an accademic environment.

4. ITC report

Gert Aadamant summarized the discussion during the first technical meeting which was held earlier during the day. Two working groups were formed during the last year: one on GMACE and the other on post-processing of correlations. It is the recommendation of the technical committee that post-process of correlations be applied to all traits evaluated at the Center, including conformation. For conformation traits Holstein priors should be used for non-Holstein breeds, all correlations lower than 0,3 should be set to the minimum allowed value of 0,3. Interbull Center should inform the countries when low correlations are changed into the minimum allowed value. All minimum and maximum values applied to other traits during post-processing of correlations should be reviewed at the next Technical meeting which will be held in Berlin next year. About the pilot run for Mendelian sampling validation (Method IV)the committee will wait for the Interbull Center to provide more details on a possible schedule.

Reinhard Reents thanked Gert for his report and for being the chairman of the technical committee. Brian Van Doormal, delegate from Canada, wondered about the decision of the minimum correlation values of 0,3 for conformation traits, is it because 0,3 is the lowest correlation value estimated for Holstein? Gert explained that the reason for different min/max values for conformation compared to the other traits was mostly due to the fact that traits with different definitions are evaluated together. The value of 0,3 will be applied to all linear traits.

9d. Synchronization of MACE and GMACE runs

Joao Durr presented a scheme for synchronization of MACE and GMACE only for test runs. In this proposal, conventional and validation data are sent at the same time by countries. When correlations are ready countries need to inform the Center if they are willing to introduce the changes tested or not. If YES the test run results are used also for the GMACE, if NOT previous results are used for GMACE. The scenario proposed might look a bit complex and complicated due to the fact that the two service's results are dependent from each other. In matters of time the proposed scenario implies that:

• Interbull Centre will have 3 weeks for estimation of correlations
• 1 week for countries to decide if introducing or not the changes tested
• 2 weeks for countries analyzing MACE results
• 1 week for countries analyzing GMACE results

The proposed schedule is quite tight due to the upcoming of the April first routine evaluation after the January test run. The benefit of applying such synchronization is that results would be comparable and countries will benefit from using foreign information in their national evaluation.

Brian Van Doormal thanked Joao for the nice initiative and time allocated to study such scheme, it is a positive signal that Interbull Center defines exact times for receiving/sending of data. He also wondered if there would be different deadlines for submission of data and pedigree for MACE and GMACE and if the truncated MACE would be performed only once per year, Joao explained that would be the case: different deadlines for sending data for MACE and GMACE and truncated MACE done once per year during January test run.
Joao's recommendation to countries planning to test severe changes would be to participate in the January 2014 test run.

7. Nomination of SC and SAC members

Erling Strandberg reported that the following Steering Committee members end their mandate this year: Juraj Candrák, Brian Van Doormal, Marjorie Faust, Bevin Harris and therefore a new election is needed. Suggestions are: Maria Klopcic (Slovenia), Daniel Abernethy (Australia+New Zealand), Brian !Van Doormal (Canada, re-election), Marjorie Faust (USA, re-election).

Reinhard Reents explained the process to the audience: the audience is welcome to suggest other names, at the end the suggested names will be sent to the ICAR board which will make it official. No other names were suggested by the audience.

Georgios Banos asked to be released from his role of convener of the Scientific Advisory Group. The role was offered to Vincent Ducrocq whom accepted. The SAC is now formed by Vincent Ducrocq, Mike Goddard and Daniel Gianola, a new member needs to be elected, suggestions for names are open and welcome.
Reinhard Reents thanked Georgios Banos for all his contribution to the Interbull community.

8. GMACE (technical report)

Reinhard reviewed the past history and decision that led to the GMACE project. The status as for January 2013 was that all countries having GEBV in place nationally were interested in participating and using GMACE results.

• 8a. Method overview

Pete Sullivan presented the latest development methods made on GMACE that led to solving two main issues about the methodology: International reliabilities less than national ones and issue on variance estimation.

The issue about International reliabilities being lower than national reliability, especially for bulls having only a national GEBV, was resolved by including information on number of EDC for the maternal grandsire in the reliability calculation.

The issue on variance estimation was resolved by including information about maternal grandsire.

Reinhard thanked Pete for the presentation and his dedication to the project.

Daniel Gianola commented on the allign method for reliabilities: as we cannot be sure that national reliabilities are calculated correctly, and therefore maybe even international reliabilities might be wrong, why the need to align them? Pete explained that the main reason was on the conceptual idea that if not extra information were added for a given bull, i.e. no foreign information available, then what was coming out from GMACE should be in line with what was provided hence the need for international reliability to be higher or at least equal to the national relibility but not lower as was the case before this adjustment.

• 8b. Results overview

Jette Jakobsen presented the editing rules for ingoing and outgoing GEBVs to GMACE.
Alfred like the methodology to define the national reliability and wondered what would be the recommended methodology. Pete explained that what presented was not a replacement methodology. National centers are still responsible to provide correct estimation of reliability. What was presented was simply an example to show the impact of re-ranking due to changes in national reliability.
Brian Van Doormal had a comment about the summary of past decisions for GMACE. He explained that the change in publication rule which obliged a country submitting GEBV to publish GMACE results while a country not submitting GEBV was not obliged to publish GMACE results was the main reason why Canada decided not to participate in the August implementation run. She underlined the importance to establish confidence also for other countries in the GMACE results and this can be only achieved by publishing the results.
Gerben de Jong from the Netherland highlighted the importance to have accurate international reliabilities. Stephen Rensing from Germany agreed with Sophie Mattalia that if a country participate in a service than it must be obliged to publish the results.

Reinhard Reents closed the first business meeting, thanked everybody for participating and reminded the audience that the next business meeting will be held on Sunday afternoon.