INTERBULL EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

No. 2022-3: July-September 2022

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This executive summary reports the latest information about the Interbull Centre and important decisions taken by the Steering Committee in their meeting on 12 September 2022.

Interbull Governance

As a follow-up to the Interbull Governance Review, a revised version of the Interbull Terms of Reference has been submitted to the ICAR Board for approval. Rules and procedures for both Interbull Technical Committee and Steering Committee will be reviewed next.

Interbull Centre Personnel

Simone Savoia left the Interbull Centre at the end of August 2022. The next chapter in his career takes him home to Scotland. We like to thank Simone for the great contributions he has brought to the Interbull Centre, and wish him all the best for his future. The position of a geneticist is hence vacant at the Interbull Centre. A job advert has recently been open, and we have now moved towards interviewing candidates.

Interbull Services

Dairy evaluations:

MACE, GMACE and InterGenomics August 2022 Routine evaluations (2208r) and September Test Evaluations (2209t) have been carried out according to schedule.

TMACE will be run, as scheduled, in October 2022. This year, the following countries are taking part in TMACE: USA, Japan, Canada, Germany/Austria and Switzerland.

Beef evaluations: For the Interbeef October 2022 Routine evaluations (2210r, soon starting, according to schedule), the use of genetic groups has been implemented. Switzerland officially joins the evaluation for calving traits and Ireland participates with a new model (submitting cross-bred performances) for the same trait group. All these new implementations have been tested successfully in the April 2022 Test evaluation (2204t).

SNP and Exchange Services:

GenoEx-PSE: No changes to the service or its user base since the release of Executive Summary No.2 in July 2022.

GenoEx-GDE: Following the inclusion of new features for improving the quality of the genotype data exchange s in April 2022, further improvements have been made: An API connection, to ease the up- and download of genotype data, has been implemented and is currently available for testing by the InterGenomics-Brown Swiss community. We anticipate that the platform will be extended to the InterGenomics-Holstein users from January 2023.

PREP Database / GE Forms

After presenting preliminary results during the 2022 Interbull Business Meeting, users were asked to continue populating and updating the “other traits” form in the PREP database until 30 September 2022. New information reported will be analysed in the next month. We also would like to remind you that the PREP database is always open to receive new information.

GE Forms for MACE trait groups “Production” and “Calving” shall no longer be submitted with the word/pdf document; Interbull Service users updating evaluation methods for MACE trait groups “Production” and “Calving” will need to use PREP.

Interbull Bulletin

The Proceedings of the 2022 Interbull Meeting in Montreal, Canada, were published in Interbull Bulletin No. 57 in September 2022 and are now available online (https://journal.interbull.org). Papers that have not been submitted yet, will be added if/when authors submit these papers. We take once more the opportunity to thank authors and co-authors for choosing the Interbull meeting to present the state of the art of their research.

European Union Reference Centre

Interbull Centre staff have held online meetings with representatives from EU Member States. This included both countries that participate in Interbull evaluations, and others which do not.

On 3 October 2022, the Interbull Centre Director attended a meeting of the European Commission’s Standing Committee on Zootechnics. In his capacity of Director of the European Union Reference Centre (EURC) for Zootechnics (Bovine Breeding), he presented the Interbull Centre, the EURC’s activities during the current programme (2021/2022) and a draft work programme for 2023/2024, with a focus on the PREP Database (https://prep.interbull.org) and the Interbull Centre’s validation services in connection to EU Animal Breeding Regulation (2016/1012) https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32016R1012. During the same meeting, it was announced that an EURC for Endangered Animal Breeds will commence on 1 January 2023. The two EURC’s have already been in discussion about collaborations.

2023 Interbull Annual Meeting

The 2023 Interbull Annual Meeting will be held in conjunction with EAAP from 26 to 28 August 2023, in Lyon, France.