Farm animal genomics

There's an interesting paper in NAR this month by Fadiel et al about farm animal genomics and informatics. It's worth a look, especially if you spend all your time working with a single genome (amalgamated 8-way conservation scores don't count).

It seems like a tough area to work in. Supposedly there's very little money available for basic research and barnyard biotech companies have a hard time finding venture capital. I guess all the money from the sort of people who are most prepared in invest in science without any short term return - public bodies and charities - gets sucked up by human genetics projects.

Speaking of public bodies, here in the UK the BBSRC - a state funding body for biological sciences - recently concluded a consultation exercise which highlighted three areas of potential: animal health, animal production and animal biology.

Animal health is to do with understanding things like susceptibility to disease and pest resistance, with the aim of developing new drugs, vaccines and diagnostics. Animal biology refers to exploring the possibilities of using animals as models of human disease: pigs and cows, for example, make much better models for obesity than mice do. Further down the line there's also the possibility of xenotransplantation, organ transfer from animals to humans.

Animal production is presumably where biotech executives see big bucks. Finding the QTLs associated with higher quality beef in cattle so that you can design better breeding programs is a simple example. A more "hands-on" approach is to design transgenic animals like the AquaBounty salmon - salmon designed to express growth hormone all year round instead of just during summer months.

The BBSRC report also highlights a skills shortage in the field when it comes to bioinformatics and quantitative genetics (isn't there a quantitative genetics skills shortage everywhere?). Of course, given the aforementioned funding problems that agricultural geneticists face, maybe this isn't surprising.