The M3GE project: developing beef cattle multi-trait multi-breed multi-country genomic evaluations for sustainability traits and small populations

Abstract

Sustainability traits, such as feed efficiency and enteric methane emissions, are difficult and expensive to measure. Establishing a large national reference population is therefore challenging, and pooling data across countries in a joint international evaluation would be beneficial. In beef cattle, data on sustainability traits are collected across multiple breeds and in small populations, including crossbred animals of various breed composition. In such scenarios, genomic prediction requires modelling the individuals’ different genetic background. Additionally, including available data on correlated indicator traits could improve the accuracy of genomic prediction for sustainability traits. However, current international beef cattle evaluations led by Interbeef are pedigree‐based, performed within each breed separately, and use data from one trait, or one group of traits, at a time. The “M3GE” project aims to develop multi-trait multi-breed multi-country genomic evaluations for beef cattle, focusing on sustainability traits and small populations. The project is the result of a collaboration between WUR, ICAR (the Netherlands), Interbull Centre (Sweden), ICBF (Ireland), AHDB, SRUC (Great Britain), and FedANA (Italy), involving six national breeding organisations from three countries. The aims of this paper are to: i) present the M3GE project and its objectives, ii) give an overview of the status of collecting and modelling feed efficiency across participating organisations, and iii) present the first results of the project. Pedigree, phenotypic, and genomic data for feed efficiency, longevity, and associated indicator traits have been collected using the Interbull Centre’s GenoEx-GDE and IDEA platforms. Initial work will focus on feed efficiency for which individual direct measures have been collected on ~13K phenotyped animals (~9K of which are genotyped), from over 15 different breeds and crossbreds recorded in Great Britain, Ireland, and Italy. The first steps include the imputation of collected genotypes to a common reference panel, population structure analysis, estimation of connectedness measures across populations, and estimation of genetic correlations across countries. The final step is to develop an international multi-breed single-step evaluation for feed efficiency including crossbred animals. This project contributes to the development of sustainable genomic evaluations in beef cattle for large and small populations.