ACGG/KOEPON—Our role in program
Hans Komen
KOEPON
Second ACGG Program Management Team
Meeting, Arusha, 27-28 January 2016
African Chicken Genetic Gains

Objectives
• Training and capacity building
through:
• MOOC -
• COURSES -
• PhD project

Project team ABGC
• Hans Komen
• John Bastiaansen
• Dieuwertje Lont

MOOC-ABG project:
Online distant learning material in
the field of
Animal Breeding and Genetics
Project leader Dieuwertje Lont

Aim of the course
“Creating online learning material that
teaches basic animal breeding and
genetics, and making (parts of) it available
for different audiences”
 capacity building within ACGG project

Project and partners
• Course is made by Wageningen University, Animal
Breeding and Genomics Centre
• Partners contribute in providing ideas, cases and
testing the materials with students
• Partners in the project:
– BOKU University, Austria (Prof. Hans Soelkner)
– JKUAT, Kenia (Prof. Anne Muigai)
– ILRI (Dr. Julie Ojango)
– Poznan University of Life Sciences, Poland (Prof.
Tomasz Szwaczkowski )

Availability
• MOOC: Massive Online Open Course
• Platform: EdX (www.edx.org)
• Basic modules will be freely available
• In-depth modules (mainly application) can be
made available to specific target groups
• First modules available in September 2016

Training courses
John Bastiaanse, Hans Komen, ILRI staff

4 courses: realised/planned
1: Breeding program design
ILRI-Addis, 09/15
2: Fundamentals of data analysis in animal
breeding
ILRI-Addis: 02/16
3: to be decided; 2016?
4: to be decided; 2017?

Fundamentals of data analysis and mixed linear models in
animal breeding
February 29 –March 4th 2016, Addis Ababa
Raphael Mrode, John Bastiaanse, Hans Komen

Outline
• Teach basics of R software
– data manipulation
– basic statistics
– Emphasis on practicals with real data
• Teach basic analysis of breeding program data
– fixed and random effects
– relationship matrix
– Emphasis on practicals with Relax and DMU
software

Exercises and discussion of results

Freely available software
• R software : https://www.r-project.org/
• Rstudio : https://www.rstudio.com/
• DMU : http://dmu.agrsci.dk/

Understanding the Effect of
Environmental Background of
Poultry Breeds in Different Agro-
Ecological Zones in Ethiopia
PhD project Maria Lozano Jaramillo
2015-2019

Development of a sustainable poultry-
breeding program that will improve chicken
productivity and will benefit smallholders.
5 Sub-national zones (SNZ)
5 Districts/SBZ
15 Villages/Dist.
6 strains/village
500 HH/SNZ
25 birds/HH/SNZ
Kuroiler-Indian breed; imported from Uganda farm
Koekoek-South African
EMBRAPA-051-Brazil
Fayoumi-France
Sasso-France
Horro-Ethiopia

Objectives
1) predict the climatic suitability of different breeds across
Ethiopia’s agro-ecological zones;
2) identify the differences between breeds for performance
traits;
3) Develop/apply methodology to estimate genetic correlations
between environments when pedigree is lacking;
4) Design blueprint for a breeding program for smallholder
farmers that takes into account the variability in
environmental conditions.

1. Climate characterization and
suitability prediction
Use the current climatic
requirements of a breed to make
predictions of the potential
distribution of the breed
Breed occurrences
Climatic layers Current climateEcological
niche
modelling
Potential distribution
model

3. Design estimation of genetic
correlation between environments
• Simulation and genomic information
– Design an experiment for the estimation of
genotype by environment interaction when
pedigree is missing.

3. GxE Experiment (February 2017)
• Horro breed
– Experiment to establish the magnitude of G x E
interaction by estimating the genetic correlation for
production traits between two locations.

more productive chickens for
Africa’s smallholders
http://africacgg.net
The presentation has a Creative Commons licence. You are free to re-use or distribute this work, provided credit is given to ILRI.