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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

July - November 2020

During the first six months of 2020, no executive summary has been published. The 2019-2020 activity report, however, does cover the changes/implementations that have happen in this period. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the ICAR-Interbull Meeting scheduled for June 2020 in Leeuwarden has been postponed to April 2021 instead. In order to give our community the possibility to ask any questions in relation to the 2019-2020 activity and finance reports, strategic plan as well as the videos that were posted online on the Interbull website, two online Q&A sections were organized on 20 August and 8 September 2020 which were followed by a total of 63 people.

Personnel

After 5½ years, Haifa Benhajali decided to leave the Centre to focus more on big data handling and machine learning. We thank Haifa for all the good years she has spent at the Centre and for all her contributions, we wish her best of luck in this new chapter of her career. A new recruitment process is starting and the vacancy will be announced very soon.

Mohammed Abdallah Ahmed Sallam has successfully finished his Master thesis at SLU working with Interbull data (IG-BSW data) on comparing multi-trait to single-trait International genomic evaluations. He has since then been employed at the Centre with a temporary position until end of 2020. He is focusing on revising the GE form questions and harmonizing the information collected so far. After this time at the Centre he will start a PhD position at SLU.

Steering Committee’s Memberships Renewal

As announced in the online meetings, Enrico Santus will hold his membership with SC for one year longer until April 2021 when also other SC memberships will be up for election. This has been also endorsed by the ICAR board. The process of collecting new candidates’ names from representative’s countries is ongoing at SC level.

MACE updates

New post-processing windows for MACE correlations: Following the ITC recommendation to review such windows every 5 years, the Centre has, during the first half of 2020, reviewed such values which were last reviewed in 2015. With the help of the post-processing working group, new values have been identified and set equal to 10% percentile of all countries’ correlations within groups. This change would allow the post-processing correlations to be more in line with the real estimated.

New services

IG-HOL: all research and developments have been implemented and during the September 2020 test run a dedicated Intergenomics HOL test run has been carried out with 7 participating countries (HRV, IRL, ISR, KOR, SVN, URY, ZAF) and 4 contributing countries (DEU, DFS, FRA, ESP). Contracts and agreements have been signed and collected. The first official IG-HOL evaluation is therefore scheduled to take place in December 2020.

Clinical Mastitis evaluation (cma):

The current mastitis evaluation, combining together SCS and (sub)-clinical mastitis information, has lately brought up two main arguments towards the possibility to have a dedicated clinical mastitis evaluation. The two main arguments were the low correlations for national bulls between national and MACE proofs and the need, in the genomic era, to have a foreign reference population for clinical mastitis not affected by the presence of SCS data. The Centre has, therefore, worked on the feasibility to offer a dedicated cma evaluation where number of daughters are based solely on clinical mastitis information with a minimum number for inclusion set to 10 daughters in 10 herds. Such new evaluation will be considered as a new service towards SNP training therefore its results will not be used for publication purposes. The associated new service fee is currently being finalized by the Business Funding Model Model working group. A first official test run for such new evaluation is envisioned for the January 2021 test run with the offcial evaluation set for April 2021.

R&D

GenoEX PSE: The Steering Committee is currently looking at ways to increase participation: the Code of Practice has been reviewed and so have been the thresholds for data requirements. The software for Parentage Discovery is at its last phase of development and the ICAR DNA working group is now working with ICAR to expand the relevant accreditation procedure which will be needed for taking part to the parentage discovery’ service.

GENOEX GDE: it has been offcially launched on August 2020 and at the moment it is available to only InterGenomics BSW users. It is envisioned to soon make it available also to InterGenomics HOL and later on to other users outside the InterGenomics service as well. First feedback from IG-BSW users have been collected since its release and the database has already been improved implementing some of the main points raised including, but not limited to better ways to accept and handle new IBC orders and sharing permissions.

SNPMACE: Agriculture Victoria Research has developed the METAGS software following recommendations by the working group. The software has been distributed first to Italy (ANARB) for testing on a different system.