Overview

2018-

The Farm animal Genotype-Tissue Expression (FarmGTEx) project, an ongoing international collaborative endeavor, aims to provide a comprehensive public resource of tissue-specific genetic regulatory variants discovery and molecular phenotype prediction in farm animal species, which will have an enormous impact on fundamental biology discovery, livestock genetics and breeding, biotechnology, adaption, evolution, cross-species mapping, and human biomedicine.   

Pilot

2018-2023 

In the pilot phase of FarmGTEx, by pulling together publicly available data from various sources via an uniform pipeline, we are adding value to the individual datasets, and creating a highly valuable resource of genetic regulatory variants across a wide range of tissues in major farm species for the whole community.

Main

2022-2033

In the main phase of FarmGTEx, we aim to investigate the regulatory variants in over 50 tissue/cell types from over 1000 individuals for each farm animal species to achieve a truly comprehensive view of the regulatory landscape and its influence on complex traits of economic value. We will also fully develop the context-dependent FarmGTEx, e.g., genetic background, diet, sex, development, response and other environmental factors.

Enhanced

2022-

In the enhanced phase of FarmGTEx, we aim to collect additional molecular data such as single-cell RNA-seq and other omics data types (e.g., epigenome, proteome, metabolome and microbiome) to further fill the gap between genome and phenome. All the knowledge obtained from FarmGTEx will be applied to interpret molecular mechanisms underlying complex traits of economic value, understand adaptive evolution and domestication, optimize genetic improvement programmes (including gene editing), and allow comparative genomics studies at different biological layers.