RUMIGEN aims at developing and comparing sustainable and socially acceptable breeding programs and management practices that would result in future generations of animals that are efficient and resilient while maintaining genetic diversity. RUMIGEN seeks to ensure that proposed breeding scenarios are acceptable to stakeholders and citizens. Currently, end-users general aim is to improve future generations of livestock using genomic selection, which results in an increase of short-term genetic improvement. However, the lower long-term genetic improvement had as consequence an increased loss of genetic diversity, a low exploitation of de novo mutations and a poor consideration of the environment impact on the expression of the genetic potential of an animal.
RUMIGEN seeks to address the question of trade-offs, through the adaptation of dairy cattle to heat stress. Statistical analyses are performed using large-scale data from commercial farms, including performances, pedigrees and genotypes, combined with meteorological records. Knowing the genomic regions that contribute to trade-offs may help to develop breeding strategies that yield optimized genetic improvement in efficiency and resilience. The project will explore whether epigenetics may provide opportunities for more efficient selection and precision farming, by assessing the transmission of epigenetic marks to the next generation and investigating how they reflect the adaptation to the environment. The development of cost-effective epigenetic tools are instrumental to address these questions with sufficient statistical power and understand how complex traits are regulated, and what genetic and environmental stressor may modulate the epigenome. Such a knowledge will contribute to design more efficient and sustainable practice and increase animal welfare.
RUMIGEN also aims to use new genomic tools for distinguishing genetic diversity, genetic drift, genetic load and genomic polymorphisms such as structural variants. They will allow to describe and optimize the impact of genomic selection schemes, localize genetic load and inbreeding depression, describe breed specific genomic polymorphisms and provide genomes sequence graphs of reference.
Beside, Genome Editing is also a new genomic tool that RUMIGEN aims to test theoretically and practically to improve genetic selection and to maintain or restore genetic diversity, especially in small local breeds.
Thus, overall, RUMIGEN breeding programs will be based on the RUMIGEN’s acquired knowledge on the understanding and studying of stakeholder and citizen views on new technologies (called “Room of Acceptance”), but also on acquired new genomic, epigenomic, and genome editing information.
Participation and dialogue with stakeholders and existing networks are critical points of this strategy, strengthening the interaction and exchange between project researchers and the stakeholders. It should ensure the sustainability and uptake of project outcomes by the scientific community and the market, increasing the likelihood that the breeding approaches developed in RUMIGEN will be implemented in practice and provide value to the whole value-chain, including EU citizens.
