ICAR’s genetic services for dairy and beef cattle are provided through the Interbull Centre, based at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, Sweden. These services provide dairy and beef industries with accurate genetic information on bulls of the major dairy and beef breeds for use by importers and exporters, thereby facilitating selection of best genetics for different countries, environments or breeding goals.
The services for dairy cattle include international genetic evaluations.
MACE compares proven bulls worldwide, GMACE evaluates young genomic bulls, and InterGenomics strengthens genomic predictions by combining data from smaller populations to support better breeding decisions across countries.
Interbeef delivers international genetic evaluations for beef cattle using raw performance data from participating countries. Through a multi-trait, multi-country model, breeding values are estimated on each national scale, enabling reliable comparisons and supporting better genetic improvement across diverse production environments.
The Interbull Centre facilitates secure data exchange through its GenoEx platform. Two services are available: Parental SNP Exchange (PSE) for improving pedigrees through parentage SNP sharing, and Genotype Data Exchange (GDE) for sharing full genotype datasets to support genomic evaluations and build larger reference populations.
The Interbull Centre is the operational unit for ICAR’s Interbull Sub Committee, Interbeef Evaluations User Group and DNA Working Group.
The Interbull Centre works with National Genetic Evaluation Centres on the publication of International Genetic and Genomic Evaluations through Multiple Across Country Evaluations (MACE), GMACE, InterGenomics and Interbeef:
Validation tests ensure that national genetic evaluation models are reliable and free from significant bias.
The Interbull Centre provides five validation methods for conventional and genomic models, helping evaluation centres confirm that their results are accurate and within accepted thresholds.