Exploring Horizons for Domestic Animal Genomics Workshop Summary (2002) / Chapter Skim
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2. The Value of Sequencing Domestic Animal Genomes
2. The Value of Sequencing Domestic Animal Genomes
Pages 3-8
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From page 3... ...
Theoretically, with information from a sequenced genome, it will be possible to have much more precision with breeding efforts and even to genetically engineer specific traits by adding, removing, or altering individual genes. In agriculture, the traits of interest are primarily production traits, noted Steven Kappes, of the U.S.
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Once a particular animal genome is sequenced, it might be possible to determine which gene or genes affect a trait, and thus give breeders the information they need to enhance the production traits of that animal. SEQUENCING FOR ENHANCED BASIC SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING Besides the agricultural benefits, genomic sequencing of domestic animals will be important in a number of areas of basic science, particularly in understanding the evolutionary relationships between species.
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From page 5... ...
SEQUENCING FOR HUMAN HEALTH AND MEDICAL RESEARCH A third category of benefits to sequencing domestic animal genomes could have more immediate practical applications. When the human genome was sequenced, it was hailed as a major step toward finding new medical treatments and other means of benefiting human health, but it was only one step, and there is much that remains unknown about the human genome and how it structures human development.
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If scientists have identified a particular gene in the mouse and know what it does, they can search the human genome for a gene with a similar sequence and surmise that the human gene probably has a function similar to the one in the mouse. This is part of annotating or creating a set of comments, notations, and references describing the experimental and inferred information about a gene or protein.
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"Having the cattle sequence or the pig sequence or any other mammalian genome from an animal that's as distant from the primates as we can get is going to help us to annotate these very interesting and compelling regions of the genome." Beyond such comparative genomics, said Steven Kappes, scientists will need to compare what is happening at the protein level in various species, or what he termed "comparative proteomics." "I think we're going to find that this is going to be a lot more informative than even comparative genomics really looking at what these genes are doing in different systems. And farm animals provide a very unique perspective to identify these genes and determine gene function." In the case of a gene called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1)
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. So application of functional genomic technology to early mammalian development using the cow and the sheep is going to be an extremely important tool to us in our understanding the early events in nuclear reprogramming and what causes embryos to live or die past a certain point, prior to and after implantation." As a result of all the research done on domestic animals over the past several decades, decoding the genomes of cows, pigs, and others will have tremendous value for human medicine, Kappes said.
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