On 10 and 11 September, the Kick-off Meeting of the European project H2020 GENE-SWitCH: The regulatory GENomE of SWine and CHicken: functional annotation during developme in Paris. It officially started on July 1, 2019, and will last for 4 years.

The project consists of eleven participating organizations from 8 different countries (France, United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain). The Animal Genetics and Improvement Program is participating from IRTA. The objective of the project is to characterize the functional elements of the genome of two monogastric species relevant to animal production such as pig and chicken in order to improve the effectiveness of genomic selection of economically relevant characters for pig sectors the poultry

The Animal breeding & genetics programme participates in the generation of expression data in order to locate genome regions and genetic variants involved in the regulation of these phenotypes and the use of these results in order to validate genomic prediction models previously developed with functional annotation data.