Twenty leading laboratories from all over the world are participating in the BovReg-Project (Identification of functionally active genomic features relevant to phenotypic diversity and plasticity in cattle). Their researchers who are from various disciplines, will form a global interdisciplinary team. The EU funded project is co-ordinated by Professor Dr. Christa Kühn, Director of the Institute of Genome Biology, FBN. The total value of funding for the project is 6 million euros and it will run for four years as part of the EU H2020 research programme.
Within the cattle farming industry there are tensions between an essential role for efficient world nutrition on the one hand and critical discussions regarding animal welfare and environmental consequences on the other. Despite enormous progress in functional genome analysis and molecular biology there are still major gaps in our understanding of the interactions between inherited factors and environmental impact that ultimately shape the phenotype of an animal, e.g. cattle.
BovReg will gain detailed knowledge on cattle phenotypes with respect to robustness, health and biological efficiency. The know-how from BovReg should also be particularly applicable in small cattle breeds of regional relevance and distribution and thus contribute to the conservation of biological diversity in farmed animals. The project includes a focus on udder health and options for reducing use of antimicrobials in animal husbandry. In addition to experts in cattle research, numerous scientists with expertise in bioinformatics, molecular genetics, quantitative genetics, animal breeding, reproduction physiology, ethics and the social sciences are represented in the network. International data sharing standards are to be developed from the genetic analyses and new bioinformatic methods established during the project. These will be integrated into the worldwide molecular biology competence network "Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes (FAANG/animalgenome.org)" and made available to the scientific community. Parallel to the ENCODE initiative (encodeproject.org), which is dedicated to characterizing the function of the human genome, FAANG is working on the identification of functional regulators in animal genomes.
