INTEGRATION OF EXTERNAL INFORMATION INTO GENETIC EVALUATIONS BY A BAYESIAN PROCEDURE J. Vandenplas 1,2 and N. Gengler 1,2 1Animal Science Unit, Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech, University of Liège, B-5030 Gembloux, Belgium 2National Fund for Scientific Research, B-1000 Brussels, Belgium CONTEXT Widespread international exchange of genetic material and, more recently, important development of genomic selection lead to the coexistence of different suboptimal genetic evaluations: Phenotypic, genealogic and genomic information of local animals Recording of performances Breeding associations Local genetic evaluations Ex. : 50 filles International exchange Local EBV EBV and genomic information of external animals ? Theoretical assumption of methods used to assess unbiased estimated breeding values (EBV): all available information has to be considered simultaneously! OBJECTIVE Development and use of methods for blending the different sources of information to achieve unbiased (better) prediction POSSIBLE SOLUTION Integration of external information into local genetic evaluations, under some assumptions, can be based on “Bayesian approach” using external information as a priori knowledge: Phenotypic, genealogic and genomic information of local animals Recording of performances Breeding associations Bayesian genetic evaluations International exchange Blended EBV EBV and genomic information of external animals J. Vandenplas (Research Fellow) and N. Gengler (Honorary Senior Research Associate) acknowledge the National Fund for Scientific Research for the support. Contact: jvandenplas@ulg.ac.be