Functional genomics for optimized milk and meat quality

Ane Skjelfjord

The present proposal is one of several coordinated projects intended to ensure a comprehensive genome-wide marker-description of the Norwegian cattle population and its diversity.

Prosjektleder: Sigbjørn Lien

Summary:
The bovine genome sequence will be published in 2006. Norway has one of the world's best databases on the genetic history, productivity and health of individual cows and bulls. Together, these resources offer dramatically new tools for understanding and improving important aspects of animal health, production economy, milk and meat healthiness and consumer acceptability.

There is in Norway an advanced and extensive quality control system for milk based on Ff-IR spectroscopy, generating millions of informative, multi-channel measurements of milk per year. This project will try to extract much more information from these milk measurements by calibrating them for a number of new phenotypes, such as fatty acid profile, animal energy balance etc. This information will then be split mathematically into genetic and environmental and feeding contributions, both of which can be used directly within existing breeding- and farm-advice schemes. Another ongoing project concerns tenderness and intramuscular fat in young NRF bulls, and this new project will reanalyse these data in order to search for more aspects of tenderness variations. Three other projects provide funding to genotype a set of 25K genome wide distributed SNPs in a large number of progeny tested NRF bulls. In this project we will use the 25K chip in a genome search for genes affecting meat quality by doing selective genotyping of 380 bulls from the tenderness/intramuscular fat project.

New statistical tools will compress these, in light of pedigree information, into haplotypes - stable "gene packages" that correlate to phenotypes such as productivity, milk protein, fatty acid profile, animal nutrition and health, beef tenderness etc. Interesting genes will be pursued by new techniques within transcriptomics, proteomics and biospectroscopy at Campus Ås in an interdisciplinary effort.

Forskdok key words: cow, bull, meat tenderness, milk, milk protein, animal health, breeding, genomics, phenotype, nutrition, fatty acid profile

Forskdok emneord: ku, okse, mørhet, melk, melkeprotein, dyrehelse, avl, genomikk, fenotype, ernæring, fettsyreprofil

Oppdatert: 03.08.06
Utskriftsvennlig versjon : Arkiv : Tips en venn