The students, postdocs, staff and faculty of the Animal Breeding and Genetics group made major contributions in leadership roles and scientific presentations at the recent Plant and Animal Genome (PAG) conference in San Diego, a premier international meeting for agricultural genomics.
Max Rothschild served his 27th year on the PAG Organizing Committee. As past-chair of the National Animal Genome Program NRSP8, Jack Dekkers co-organized the NRSP8 workshop and business meeting. He also gave a talk: “Update on the Natural Disease Challenge Model”. James Koltes, NRSP8 Bio-informatics co-coordinator (serving with Jim Reecy and Fiona McCarthy of Arizona State), provided reports to define the support provided by the bioinformatics coordinatorship to the species group workshops (cattle, pig, poultry). James also co-lead a working group discussion (with Alenka Hafner) on Data reuse. Sue Lamont organized the workshop on “Animal Genomics and Adaptation to Climate Change”, and serves as the Administrative Advisor of the NC1170 Multistate Research Project which held its annual meeting at PAG. Stephan Schmitz-Esser presented an invited talk entitled: “The rumen wall microbiota: composition, function and their potential contributions to animal health and performance.” Juan Steibel delivered two invited presentations: “Prediction of Indirect Genetic Effects of Competition and Genomic Prediction of Inter-Individual Interactions” and “Genome-Wide Association for Genomic BLUP Models”. At the Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes (FAANG) Workshop, Chris Tuggle presented results of the US-Pig-FAANG project, organized discussion on FAANG Taskforces and gave an introduction to the Agricultural Genomes to Phenomes Initiative (AG2PI). As NRSP8 Swine co-coordinator (serving with Cathy Ernst, Michigan State), Chris delivered the US Pig Genome Coordinator report, the Iowa Station report and a presentation on AG2PI at the NRSP8 Swine workshop.
The students, postdocs and staff of ABG had a strong presence in sharing their research at workshops and the two poster sessions. First authors of research presentations/posters included: Vishesh Bhatia, Ryan Corbett, Leo James, Michael Kaiser, Carrie Meeks, Bruna Petry and Pengxin Yang.