Institutionen för husdjursgenetik Prospects of performing multiple-country comparison of dairy sires for countries not participating in Interbull international genetic evaluations

With the international trade of genetic material of dairy bulls there is a need for genetic evaluations performed internationally. For this reason Interbull and the Interbull centre was established, today 42 countries are members of the organization and 26 countries participating in one or several genetic evaluations. At this moment there are no alternative to fully participate in the evaluations or not. The aim of this study was to investigate if there is a possibility to include a country in the regular evaluations without including any data from the country in question and in that way provide countries not yet participating in the evaluations with an alternative to fully participate. In this study Argentina was representing the member countries not yet participating in the international evaluation. Data from Argentina was included in a regular genetic evaluation performed by Interbull, also including data from 25 other countries. From the results the bulls where ranked according to their predicted genetic merit. Predicted genetic merits were also estimated by using a model described by Mark et al, 2006b. This model was used with different correlation matrices, giving in total seven different alternatives. The bulls in the different alternatives where ranked according to the same criteria as after the Interbull genetic evaluation. The results from the Interbull evaluation and the different alternatives was statistically analyzed and compared. The results showed that it is possible to perform an international genetic evaluation for a country without submitted data. For the top 100 bulls the alternative methods found 37 to 67 co-selected bulls. The best result was found when using the same correlation matrix as in the Interbull evaluation. When looking at the country of origin for the top 100 ranked bulls, the different alternatives did with some exception include the same countries as the Interbull evaluation. This study has showed that it is possible for the Interbull centre to perform alternative genetic evaluations for countries that do not submit any data. If there are a demand for this kind of service.