Introduction

The international buffalo consortium (IBGC) has completed the assembly of the draft genome sequence of the river buffalo and the outline sequence of the swamp buffalo.  Re-sequencing of diverse breeds of river and swamp buffalo has identified over 16M SNPs and a 90K SNP genotyping panel has been designed and tested.  The IBGC focus is now moving from the creation of the molecular tools to their application.  This year the buffalo workshop will describe work that is underway to annotate the buffalo sequence, to study genetic diversity of buffalo species globally and the identification of functional variations.  The workshop will also look forward to the application of genomics in buffalo breeding and selection.