Impact

RUMIGEN will define sustainable and acceptable breeding objectives and develop innovative evaluation methods taking into account trade-offs, genetic diversity preservation, rare alleles / de novo mutations, heritable epigenetics and Genotype X Environment interactions. Many scenarios will be evaluated under a variety of local farming systems and climate constrains, making it possible to identify the most suited one(s) for each system. Overall, RUMIGEN will disseminate evaluation methods, selection tools, guidelines for sustainable and acceptable breeding programs, for cosmopolitan and local breeds, that can accommodate future environmental conditions, likely harsher and hotter than today. Breeding societies and cooperatives will directly benefit from these innovations in order to produce and market AI bulls well adapted to the new farming systems and climate. Resulting improvement of cattle resilience and health will benefit to Farmers, Consumers and society will benefit from a more sustainable supply of high-quality milk and dairy products from healthier animals as well as positive knock-on effects for the environment and economy.

RUMIGEN will provide a new set of phenotypes (adaptation to heat stress, sensitivity to environmental stress) as well as key molecular biomarkers useful to characterize the cattle epigenome and predict the environmental conditions met by the cattle (climate, feeding, housing, diseases…) as well as their phenotype, including immune-competence and health. Management indexes developed during the project are expected to be well correlated to individual performances and to reflect the production potential of an animal. In the context of precision farming, such management indexes should be very efficient to identify animals that underperform, suggesting a suboptimal environment. Breeding industry will benefit from these tools which will stimulate and help applied research on breeding strategies, in order to maximise short- and long-term genetic improvement while avoiding negative effects on animal production and health. Farmers and Advisers will benefit from these innovations, in order to monitor the cattle’s status and, for instance, adapt the nutrition planes to mitigate foetal alterations occurring after foetal heat stress or a poor foetal nutrition (e.g. due to a period of drought or a high negative energy balance during gestation…).

The project will provide practical solutions for genomic selection in small and local breeds, reducing the technological gap with the largest breeds and, therefore, improving their conditions for sustainability and preserving cattle diversity. With the help of stakeholders, RUMIGEN’s partners will develop guidelines on breeding strategies to maintain the genetic diversity within and among breeds. The end-result could be a set of tools to guide breeders. To achieve these guidelines, genomic prediction methods will be developed to better capture genetic variations due to rare alleles and de novo mutations (such that the favorable alleles are kept in the next generation, even if no data is available for them). In parallel, new genome assemblies will be built for small local breeds, using state of the art short- and long-read sequencing technologies. They will provide sequence and structural variation information within and between bovine breeds, thus they would be a natural obvious reference for inferences on genetic diversity at the DNA level.

Knowledge acquired throughout the project will indicate novel key molecular biomarkers relevant for semen quality control. Breeding companies will benefit from predictors and monitoring tools of bull fertility. This issue is crucial in a context of Genomic Selection, where marketed semen is now produced by younger or barely mature bulls, without any prior data on their field fertility, epigenetic signature or progeny performance. Altogether, this will increase the availability of efficient semen from young elite bulls and hasten genetic progress within the European dairy herds. Hence, Farmers will directly profit from this research. Overall increased genetic improvement underpins more efficient and sustainable milk production from resilient, healthy and high-welfare cattle, ensuring thus the long-term economic and environmental sustainability of the Dairy industry, which represents 600k dairy farms, 12k processing facilities and 300k jobs, producing 12% of all EU agricultural revenue.