| Popis: |
The SMARTER (SMAll RuminanT breeding for Efficiency and Resilience) H2020 project aims to develop and implement innovative strategies to improve resilience and efficiency (R&E) related traits in sheep and goats. Regarding feed efficiency, the objective is to identify novel traits that would be relevant, easy to measure and cheap enough to be collected in many animals to identify the most efficient individuals. In practice, feed efficiency can be assessed by different criteria such as residual feed intake and feed conversion ratio. Both criteria require feed intake to be measured for each individual which remains an expensive trait to get and hardly feasible under farm conditions. Thus, our objective is to identify novel traits related to feed efficiency and use them as proxies for feed intake and/or feed efficiency. First, novel phenotypes are identified and studied in experimental farms where feed intakes of concentrate and forage are recorded for each animal. Different novel phenotypes are being considered to study feed efficiency in sheep and goats, including (i) biomarkers (from blood or milk metabolomics), (ii) differentially expressed genes in targeted tissues, (iii) genomic polymorphisms, (iv) ruminal microbiota, (v) faecal NIR spectra, (vi) greenhouse gas emissions and body composition traits. These novel traits will be recorded either under classical feeding or under nutritional restriction to quantify, for example, the impact of a shortage of concentrate inputs. Then, the most promising novel traits will be measured in commercial populations. From these larger datasets, we will estimate heritabilities of the novel traits and genetic correlations to other traits in the breeding goal. Finally, for some case studies, we will quantify GxE interactions, particularly by considering the same breed under different breeding systems or regions. |
