The workshop “Training on Reaction Norm Models” was held on the 4th and 5th April 2017 in Madrid, Spain, at Instituto Nacional de Investigación y Tecnología Agraria y Alimentaria (INIA). This workshop was organized as part of the activities developed within iSAGE Task 5.1 “Animal phenotypes for resilience, adaptability and sustainability”.
The workshop was attended by the following participants:
- AGRAMA- CERSYRA-IRIAF: Manuel Ramón (Instructor)
- ARDIEKIN: Eva Ugarte
- ASSAFE: María Angeles Jiménez
- AUTH: Panoraia Alexandri
- CSIC: Ignacio Martín
- INRA: Dominique Hazard
- INIA: María J. Carabaño, Clara Díaz, Magdalena Serrano (Organisers)
The workshop started with an introduction to the analysis of reaction norms showing the statistical analysis principles and application in previous studies of INIA’s group. Then a demonstration was given on the procedures of preparation of databases and statistical analyses, based on R scripts prepared by Manuel Ramon.
On the other hand, Dominique Hazard presented the analyses that INRA is planning to carry out for weather and productive data.
An agreement was finally reached among participants to start performing analyses of the data at population and herd or production system level, in order to establish the importance of thermal stress (heat and cold) effects on productivity. This kind of analysis should provide useful information on the resilience to climate of sheep and goats for a wide range of genetic resources and production systems. Once the significance of thermal stress effects on production is established, individual tolerance analyses will be carried out to obtain pseudo phenotypes for GWAS and identification of genomic regions involved in this trait.
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 679302.