Sustainable and innovative use of genetic collections
The goal of WP6 is to demonstrate the contribution of genetic collections to diversity restoration or to
reintroduce ‘lost’ alleles in breeding populations and animal production systems, in order to increase livestock
systems’ resilience. To reach this goal, WP6 will:
Develop models and criteria to reintroduce genetic material of breeds or well-characterised individuals into
current populations, to restore biodiversity and give new directions to breeding programmes;
Set up case studies highlighting complementarity between ex-situ collections and in-situ breeding
populations;
Develop a toolbox to improve introgression and conservation schemes and demonstrate its usefulness to
breeders through case studies;
Define genetic traceability criteria for branding a high-quality product from a particular breed (case studies)
Illustrate the usefulness of gene banks as tools to gauge genetic changes over time in livestock populations
In WP6, current ‘neutral and quantitative’ approaches will be upgraded with ‘functional and qualitative’
information so that important gene variants, haplotypes and gene variant combinations along pathways can be
preserved in gene banks that are missing or eroding in in-situ populations. The gene-flow method will be
extended to modelling of arbitrary variables with known transition rules for finite population sizes in a
stochastic way. The optimal contribution method, which is the method of choice to maximise genetic diversity
in collections and populations, will be upgraded to deal with sequence data, multiple constraints and different
regions of the genome simultaneously. WP6 will particularly use results from characterisation undertaken in
WP4. The introgression of a functional trait from a gene bank collection into a live breed will be demonstrated.
WP6 will result in:
Novel gene flow-based method and software to optimise conservation and introgression schemes
Improved optimal contribution methodology and software
Simulation-based comparison of methods for restoration of breed with minimal inbreeding
Real-life example of integrating gene bank material into an in-situ population