International Evaluations

Some countries, especially those with small populations, may be unable to implement a national genomic evaluation, especially if they are not part of a large international genotype-exchange consortia.

The basic principle of the InterGenomics service is to pool genotypes provided by participating countries to create a unique reference population for international genomic evaluation without the need of sharing genotypes among participants. InterGenomics is an international genotype-based genomic evaluation service provided by Interbull. InterGenomics predicts GEBVs on each specific country-trait combination scale, for the traits evaluated in the Interbull MACE Service. The distributed results from InterGenomics evaluations are SNP-effects, DGVs, GEBVs, and their reliabilities. In addition, information on duplicate genotypes, SNP-conflicts and parentage conflicts are also provided. The target participants for InterGenomics are breeds and populations that are too small to have an effective national genomic evaluation, and that will benefit from a service with a pooled reference population. Interbull carries out international genomic evaluations for two breeds:

1. Brown Swiss (InterGenomics-Brown Swiss)
2. Holstein (InterGenomics-Holstein).

The InterGenomics-Brown Swiss service has been in place since 2011 with populations from seven countries. After originally pooling genotypes, participating National Genetic Evaluation Centres agreed after a few years to share genotypes among participants.