Genetic Map for Cattle Completed

A recent scientific breakthrough, creating a genetic map for cattle is now completed. This finished map is now allowing for researchers to work with reducing animal disease and improving the nutrition of beef and dairy products. This information was, according to the New York Times, along with other sources, a result of a 53 million-dollar international project to sequence the genome of different breeds of cattle. When the program was launched in December 2003, the US Department of Agriculture contributed 11 million dollars. Cattle have about the same amount of base pairs, close to three billion, as humans and the project was focused on documenting them, which they did successfully. They have completed one breed, the Hexeford, with six other breeds to come.

The draft is now available globally on a public database. Biomedical and agricultural researchers will have access to this information and in return, will allow them to study for ways to further improve the nutrition and quality of beef products. They hope the information will allow them to distinctively track the genetic makeup of the animal to produce more disease-resistant livestock. They also hope to be able to reduce the amount of antibiotics they give the cattle. This is quite the breakthrough for human genome sequencing, as it will help fill in some holes on the Human Genome Project, and help treat human diseases. Researchers continue to sequence and compare to those that have already been sequenced, such as humans. Results of the comparing of the bovine genome sequence to human genome will be available in the next several months.

Experts and researchers say that cattle are an excellent animal for humans to use for better

understanding of human health. They say the cow provides for a worthy model because of the great amount of researching that has gone on with respect to multi-genic physiological traits. Since they have co-evolved with humans, they accurately represent species with various selected phenotypes, and have strong medical communities to support and research genome sequence information. During the time in which cattle were evolving with man, they have gone under intense selection pressures for their different phenotypes. Two very distinct phenotypes are: milk production, or in other parts of the world, pulling plows or living in tropical environments and tolerating certain pathogens. Since cattle have these