What performance for tomorrow’s animals? Breeding goals and selection methods

Abstract

Meeting the issues related to sustainable development of livestock farming requires innovations in genetics. In every sector, this is all about improving the robustness of animals by enhancing their abilities to adapt by including numerous efficiency traits in the breeding goals of selection programs particularly regarding health and adaptability to less standardized feed resources and of fluctuating nutritional value, changing and varied environments, and climate change. This leads to consider genotype-by-environment interactions within genetic evaluation procedures and to assess the performances of animals in low input systems, especially regarding feed and drug use. Since the end of the 2000s, the method that has been progressively used in all livestock breeding sectors is genomic selection, which, by disconnecting the computation of genetic values of selection candidates from phenotype recordings, makes it easier to select new traits and to take into account genotype-by-environment interactions. In the relatively near future, it will be technically possible to use strategies of targeted modification and selection of genomes that could substantially increase genetic gains, in comparison with those obtained with current genomic selection programs. However, the use of these new breeding techniques raises numerous issues on scientific, operational, ethical, and political levels.