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