Objective
Summary of objectives: Guidelines will be developed for:
1. The selection of breeds and animals to cryo-conserve biodiversity. 2. Assessing the numbers of gametes and embryos that are needed to re-establish conserved breeds; to create new synthetic breeds; and for the use of specific genes of conserved breeds.
3. decreasing inbreeding and thus loss of genetic variation in small populations by using cryo-conserved genes.
Summary of the proposal content For Objective 1, firstly, an objective criterion measuring bio-diversity will be derived. Next, methods will be developed to make the trade off between cryo- conserving many breeds and few animals per breed versus few breeds and many animals pe- breed. These methods will be extended to account for the genetic relationships between breeds. Also, methods to select animals within breeds for cryo-conservation will be developed.
For objective 2, numbers of embryos and gametes, that can re-establish a breed by implanting cryo-conserved embryos in donor females, mating cryo-conserved gametes, or continued back-crossing with gametes from one sex, will be assessed. Regeneration of conserved populations may be needed to re-fill semen/embryo supplies, serve future cross breeding programs, serve recreational purposes, or replace commercial populations to meet new markets or environments. Synthetic breeds can be developed from frozen semen or embryos and the required numbers will be assessed.
Specific genes can be used by repeated back crossing using DNA markers to maintain the required genes. Efficient back crossing strategies will be developed.
Objective 3 combines in situ and ex situ conservation to reduce rates of inbreeding and thus maintain bio-diversity. In population genetics terms, cryo-conserved gametes or embryos will have long generation intervals and thus will increase the average generation interval, which decreases rates of inbreeding. Efficient strategies to decrease rates of inbreeding in small populations by cryo-conservation will be developed.
From the numbers of conserved gametes and embryos that are needed for the various purposes of cryo-conservation, an overall recommendation for the number of gametes and embryos that have to be frozen will be made.
The general recommendations and guidelines will be reported in a book that will be available to funding bodies and other interested parties.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsDNA
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- agricultural sciencesanimal and dairy sciencedomestic animalsanimal husbandry
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineembryology
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Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CON - Coordination of research actionsCoordinator
8200 AB LELYSTAD
Netherlands