Editorial: Advances in Farm Animal Genomic Resources

Livestock conservation is changing rapidly in light of policy developments, climate change, and diversifying market demands. The last decade has seen a step change in technology and analytical approaches available to define and manage Farm Animal Genetic Resources (FAnGR). However, these rapid changes pose challenges for FAnGR management in terms of technological continuity, analytical capacity, and integrative methodologies. Indeed, high-throughput single-nucleotide polymorphism genotyping is available for all major farm animal species and beyond the technological challenge to deal with these large molecular datasets, their integration with geo-environmental and socioeconomic information is key to making sense of the data in practical conditions. Research Networking Programme " Advances in Farm Animal Genomic Resources " (Genomic-Resources) proposed an action dedicated to the education of young scientists in cutting edge actions directly connected a community of 350 researchers to develop activities with the goal to meet two major challenges: (i) training in the use of novel methods able to manage and analyse high-throughput molecular data, and (ii) promoting collaboration between the animal science and social science communities to more efficiently manage FAnGR. In addition to the activities described above, Genomic-Resources has, in this issue of Frontiers in Genetics, fostered scientific contributions applying new methods to genomic and bioinformatics approaches for characterization of FAnGR, enhancing ex-situ and in-situ FAnGR conservation methods, promoting socioeconomic elements of FAnGR conservation, transferring lessons between wildlife and livestock biodiversity conservation and has evaluated the contribution of FAnGR to a transition in agriculture (agro-ecology). The 31 articles can be broadly attributed to six different topic areas. The first topic area contains general papers dealing with the identification of questions of highest priority for FAnGR research during the coming decade (Bruford et al., 2015), the common management challenges shared by livestock breeds and threatened natural populations (Kristensen et al., 2015), the transformation of FAnGR from economic, ecological, and scientific into political entities (Tamminen, 2015), and on the impact of climate change on genetic resources, which constitute the livelihoods of around 1 billion people worldwide (Boettcher et al., 2015). The latter paper links to a section of papers dedicated to Africa, a continent where livestock genetic resources are particularly endangered and where climate change poses a major threat. The need to increase short-term productivity is prompting the substitution of local breeds by cosmopolitan ones, with the consequence of breeders becoming dependent on expensive external inputs (Colli et al., 2014) instead of making greater …