Farm animal genetic and genomic resources from an agroecological perspective

and Zerjal T (2015) Farm animal genetic and genomic resources from an agroecological perspective. Agroecology, as a scientific approach, relies on a better knowledge of biodiversity at all levels of organization and function, in order to better manage agricultural production systems, from farm scale to landscape. Ecological concepts such as functional redundancy, complementary use of resources, can be applied to farming systems, with the purpose of improving their resilience. Transposing the concepts of agroecology to livestock production has been recently proposed by Dumont et al. (2013). One of the principles proposed for the design of sustainable animal production systems is to enhance diversity within animal production systems in order to strengthen their resilience. Why is it so? An increased biodiversity allows benefiting from complementary aptitudes. For example, in the case of disease resistance, the diversity of hosts will limit the risk of the specialization of a highly pathogenic agent with devastating consequences. It does not mean that diseases will not occur but the spread of infections and the overall impact on animal health should be limited (Springbett et al., 2003). How the agroecology concepts can be applied to farm animal genetic resources and how the genomics approach may be used to facilitate it? Biodiversity in livestock production systems may be considered at all scales, from individuals and breeds to species and ecosystems. Several levels may be considered to increase biodiversity in livestock production systems, such as intermixing species within production systems. This paper will focus on within-species biodiversity that goes from local breeds to highly selected populations. At the population scale, one possibility is to increase the number of breeds in use, or to produce new composite populations, as done for the Creole cattle in the French West Indies (Gau-tier and Naves, 2011). At the local scale (i.e., the farm), the increase of biodiversity may be obtained by intermixing breeds, by using crossbreeding but also by monitoring individual genetic diversity within a group. What could be the drivers for such a trend toward increased biodiversity? Stratified crossbreeding between local breeds is likely to increase the level of diversity at the individual level, because of a higher heterozygosity of F1, but may not increase the diversity within a group since F1 animals are likely to inherit the most frequent alleles present in their parental breeds. The main issue is still to maintain genetic diversity within each parental breed. Breeding for an …