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Interbeef Guidelines

Version 1
InterBeef

contact: Interbull Centre - Dept. Animal Breeding and Genetic SLU,
Box 7023 S-75007 Uppsala, Sweden

Phone: 0046-18-671994
Fax: 0046-18-672848
E-mail : interbeef@hgen.slu.se
URL : http://www.icar.org/pages/working_groups/wg_interbeef.htm

1. INTRODUCTION

Countries willing to join InterBeef must be members of Interbull and support the ICAR guidelines for data collection (http://www.icar.org/). This document is a description of the necessary actions and relevant files required by a new country willing to join InterBeef.

2. THE ANIMAL INTERNATIONAL IDENTIFICATION

2.1 Format

A unique international identification for each animal is used in the international genetic evaluation system and will be referred to as the Animal International IDentification (AIID). The AIID is constructed using the Interbull rules (referred as Interbull format in the document) and its structure is:

Breed + Country + Sex + Identification number

• The field ‘Breed‘ of the AIID refers to the breed of identification of the animal in its country of first registration (in most cases, the country of origin): 3 characters as defined in the Interbull Breed Codes, available at www.interbull.org (see Reference section).

• The field ‘Country’ of the AIID refers to the country of first registration of the animal (in most cases, the country of origin): 3 characters or 3 digits number as defined in ISO 3166 Codes, available at http://userpage.chemie.fu-berlin.de/diverse/doc/ISO_3166.html (see Reference section).

• The field ‘Sex’ of the AIID refers to the sex of the animal (M = male ; F = female)

• The field ‘Identification number’ of the AIID refers to the identification number of the animal in the country of first registration: 12 characters right justified with left blanks filled in with zero (“0”).

Ex: CHAFRAM006327826864 refers to

• A Charolais CHA
• First registered in France FRA
• A male M
• With the following identification in France 006327826864

Ex: BAQIRLF125693456875 refers to

• A Blonde d’Aquitaine BAQ
• First registered in Ireland IRL
• A female F
• With the following identification in Ireland 125693456875

2.2 Constructing the international identification number

A country should first construct the international identifications for the animals born on its soil. The general rule for this construction would be that a given identification number is unique within a country and a breed.

When an animal (live animal or issued from AI straw or embryo) is sold abroad, the importing country should avoid re-registration; in case of re-registration the original ID and the national ID should be kept.

The animal ‘IE231112150014’ is, for example, a pure breed Irish limousine female named ‘SHRIFFTOWN RIPPER’. Ireland has constructed its AIID as followed: LIMIRLF231112150014.

The animal ‘FR0384106449’ is a pure breed French Charolais bull named ‘VLADIMIR’. That animal is also used in Ireland under the name ‘VLADIMER’ and the number ‘0384106449’ and has also been re-codified ‘108376849’ and ‘VLR’. France constructs its AIID as followed: CHAFRAM000384106449.

In the international identification number, hyphens, slashes, commas, dots, blank spaces or any other symbols are allowed.

The animal ‘UK9373 70-2/-7’, for example, is a UK Salers female animal and its international identification number would be ‘SALGBRF9373 70-2/-7’

2.3 The New Web Interface at Interbull

Interbull has developed a new database, IDEA (Interbull Data Exchange Area) that allows register users to all the pedigree handling functionalities. IDEA is available at https://idea.interbull.org/

IDEA is exclusive for database users. To become a database user you need to belong to a national evaluation centre participating to the Interbeef evaluation. If you want to join the Interbeef evaluation and therefore have access to IDEA, your national genetic centre needs to be associated to a username and a contact email address. To get your national genetic centre listed among the ones participating to the Interbeef evaluation, you have to:

Send an email to interbeef@hgen.slu.se providing information on your national genetic centre: Full name and address of the organization and full name and email address of the designated contact person. Clearly state the breed(s) and trait(s) you wish to participate with. If your organization provides data as a joint evaluation including other countries, you clearly have to state for which other countries and breed(s) your organization provides pedigree and performance information.

Upon reception of your request, Interbull will send you by email a link to an IDEA-test environment together with a username and password so that you will be able to get acquainted with the IDEA functionalities and the user manual which is located under “Help”.

The national pedigree file must be first checked with the CheckPedigree.py script provided by Interbull Centre. The checking programs are available under “Software”. The zip files produced by the Python scripts represent the only valid infiles for the database; no other files will be accepted by the system.
When your pedigree enters the database it undergoes a series of checks called “verification process” aiming at identifying the correct authoritative organization of each and every animals listed in your pedigree. In general the system has been built in such a way that it accepts information only if these comes from the authoritative organization. Therefore, whenever you submit pedigree data, the system first checks that the combination “country-breed” in the animal ID matches with the combination your organization “owns”. If so the records are considered correct and stored in the database, if this is not the case then the records will be listed in the appropriate authoritative organization account waiting for verification, i.e. waiting for the authoritative organization to provide the correct pedigree information. In case the authoritative organization is a country or organization that does not yet participate to the Interbeef evaluation, then the animals will appear as verified by Interbull until eventually that country/organization would join the service.

Example:
Ireland submits the following pedigree records to the database:

601 CHAIRLM458962315289 CHAIRLM789456123652 CHAIRLF369852147852 1985 OMAR IRL
601 CHAFRAM865412398745 CHAFRAM231658479851 CHAFRAF845693274125 1988 OSCAR IRL

In the first case the animal is an Irish Charolais sent by Ireland. Ireland is therefore the authoritative organization for that animal so the record gets stored in the database. In the second case the animal appears to be a French Charolais sent by Ireland. Ireland is no longer the authoritative organization for this bull therefore the system will send the record to the French account and will wait for France to provide its correct pedigree information.

3. THE REQUIRED FILES

There are 5 groups of files to be created by a country willing to join the international beef genetic evaluation:

• The 601 file representing the national pedigree file
• The 602 file representing the national performance file (limited until now to adjusted weaning weights, adjusted carcass weight and calving ease)
• The 603 file representing the parameter file.
• The 604 file representing the ET file
• The 605 file representing animals with official proof
• The Beef Form, see Reference section.

A country willing to join InterBeef needs to include at least one breed and one trait in the process of the international genetic evaluation. The objective of the present document is to help a new member country in the construction of these files.

NB: Since the verification of the International ID is done via database, national cross-reference files are no longer needed. For more information about IID verification, please refer to the IDEA user manual.

3.1 The Different InterBeef steps

The construction of these files follows several steps:

• The first step for a country that wishes to join the international evaluation system is to upload the pedigree file into the IDEA database (https://idea.interbull.org/).

• Once the pedigree file (601) is uploaded into the database, the country will have to correct its own database according to the feedback obtained from the database regarding verified pedigree information from authoritative organizations. (see corrected foreign information in the IDEA user manual)

• Once this step has been fulfilled then countries will proceed sending performance file (file 602), parameter file (file 603) and eventually an ET file (file 604) to the Interbull ftp server.

3.2 General principles for file preparation:

• Numeric information must be right justified.
• Characters must be left justified.
• All characters should be in upper case.

3.3 The national pedigree file (601 file)

The 601 file is a national pedigree file and must contain pedigree information of all animals included in the performance file in an animal-sire-dam format. Sires, dams and ancestors must also have an entry in this file as an animal; unknown ancestors should be coded ‘UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU’.

To ensure sufficient pedigree information it is recommended that pedigree information of animals born within a period equivalent to a minimum of three generation intervals should be included. The 601 file is a file issued per country or organization providing pedigree information according to the format shown in Table 1. The 601 files can contain one breed or multiple breeds.

3.4 The performance file (602)

All animals with a performance must have a line as animal in the 601 pedigree file. The performance file must be constructed in agreement with the 601 file and be consistent with the international identification of the animal.
It is expected that countries participating with data support the ICAR guidelines for beef recording.
As indicated in the ICAR recommendations, any group of animals kept for the same purpose and at the same location shall be regarded as a whole herd. For a performance record to be considered an official record, the whole herd as defined above must be recorded. Each herd is identified with 15 digits identification, coded as characters:

• The first three digits correspond to the country, using the ISO 3166 Alpha-3 system, see Reference section.
• The next 12 digits correspond to the identification of the herd within the country. The original herd identification number should be used. The characters (letters or numbers) are right justified, the left blanks being filled with zeros.

All performance traits are associated with their environmental effects and complementary information (one observation line per measurement) as described in Table 2.

3.5 Parameter file (603)

The parameter file (603) contains the name of two variables and the names of the environmental effects for each trait included in the performance file (602). This file must be provided together with the 602 file.

3.6 ET file (604)

The ET file (604) contains a list of ET IDs which will be included in the pedigree used for the international evaluation. Country willing to get international breeding values for ET animals based on parent average will have to provide the file at each evaluation. This file is not a mandatory file.

3.7 OFCL file (605)

The OFCL file (605) contains a list of IDs of animals with official proof in the participating country. According to a new proposal for the publication policy, if the national proof of an animal is considered as official, the international predicted breeding value of the animal on the scale of that country would be publishable.

4. ABBREVIATIONS

Table 6: List of abbreviations used in Interbull files and documentation

5. HOW TO REPORT CALVING TRAITS

Calving traits present a direct and a maternal component. For some traits, such as stillbirth and birth weight preparation of a file602 can be difficult because of the absence of an international ID for a dead calf. Given that Interbeef is an international data sharing platform, it is absolutely necessary that records are exchanged in a standardized way and that data quality must be ensured at the best of our capacity. Based on these two principles, there is a strong intention to keep phenotypic records under an universal formats capable of handling all possible traits (files 602 and 603). Likewise, only valid international animal idetification is admitted into the system (file 601).

Phenotypic records for calving traits will therefore be reported as maternal traits (the International ID of ANIMAL in the file602 will refer to the dam ID) with the necessary information to fit a model for the direct trait added in the "environmental effects" fields of file 602. This includes additional information about the calf, such as sire of the calf, sex of the calf, calf birth date and calf ID (when available). Consider, for instance a record for stillbirth (stb). In file 602, a typical record could be reported as shown in Table 6.

For calving traits, the embryo transfer fleld in the 602 file is related the the calf and not the the dam itself.

Table 7: Example of a file 602 record for stillbirth.

When calf additional information is reported in File602 (Table 6), the equivalent parameter File603 should also refer to the same variables. Although calf additional information is reported in the "environmental effects" field, it is not necessarily intended to be fit as an effect into the statistical model for the maternal trait. Since records on file 602 refer do the CALF DAM, in the parameter file the type of effects refer to the model for the maternal trait only. Therefore, variables that are reported in File602 to be used in the direct trait model should be labeled as "C" in the effect type field, so it is clear they are not fixed or random effects, neither covariates in the maternal trait model.

In the example on Table 7, calf sex, parity, season and age at calving are included as a fixed effects (effect type "F" in File603), while calf sire, calf birthdate and calf ID are labelled as effect type "C", which means they will not be fitted in the maternal trait model, but used for modelling the direct effect. For instance, calf ID, calf sire and calf birthdate would be needed to create a pedigree structure for the direct trait analyses.

Table 8: Example of a parameter file 603 that matches Table 6 example.

6 FILENAMES

All transferred files should be written in ASCII format and use character encoding: UTF-8

Specifically for the pedigree files, organizations will find access in IDEA to two Python scripts, CheckPedigree.py and CheckLinks.py. Aim of these scripts is to assure that pedigree and linking information are correct prior entering the database environment. To run the script type at the prompt:

Python2.6 CheckPedigree.py –m {organization code⁽¹⁾} –f {pedigree file name}

For more information about the CheckPedigree.py and the CheckLinks.py see Appendix I (a and b).

If the scripts detect no errors in the pedigree or link file then a zip file “IB-ORGCODE-yyyymmddThhmmss.zip.” or “IB202-org_code-yyyymmddThhmmss.zip” would be created. The zip file produced by the Python scripts represent the infile for the Interbull database; no other file would be accepted.

For the time being before the database would be ready to accept performance and parameter file the nomenclature for these types of files would be:

COUNTRY.BREED.FILE.TRAIT_TYPE.DATE⁽²⁾

For example, a file from Ireland with performance for Limousine sent on 2010-01-18 would be called: IRL.LIM.F602.AWW_20100118
A parameter file from the same country and breed would be called IRL.LIM.F603.AWW_20100118

⁽¹⁾ For the Org.Code, see Reference section. ⁽²⁾ date yyyymmdd format

REFERENCES

ISO 3166 Country Codes: http://userpage.chemie.fu-berlin.de/diverse/doc/ISO_3166.html
Breed Codes for International Genetic Evaluation of dairy and beef cattle: http://www.interbull.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=56&Itemid=77

Guideline to Form Beef and Form_Beef: http://www-interbull.slu.se/Interbeef/General_info/framesida-general.htm

InterBeef link on Interbull website: http://www-interbull.slu.se/Beef_Gen_Ev/framesida-beef.htm