International Milk Genomic Consortium

The International Milk Genomic Consortium (IMGC) was created in 2003 with the goal to bring together the science of milk, lactation, nutrition and genetics. Recognizing the opportunity to use lactation as a model and a starting point to understand human health, the IMGC brought together world-class scientists from USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands, France, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and more.

IMGC studies Lactation from every aspect to discover how milk works and why it is so valuable to evolution. To accelerate the knowledge exchange a unique web portal based at UC Davis coordinates bioinformatic data collection and analysis and exchange. The IMGC Web Portal provides a virtual environment in which members of the international milk and lactation research community collaborate to understand the biological processes underlying mammalian milk genomics, the biological products that result from milk and lactation genes, and the health traits that these biological processes and products confer to mothers and infants. The IMGC portal was instrumental in annotating the lactation genes as a part of the recent world wide Bovine Sequencing Project.