Elsa Chacko and Professor Shoba
Ranganathan, two Australian researchers
on the team.
Image: Macquarie University
The huge project, which was published in the prestigious international journal Science in April, has implications, not only for future genetic improvements to livestock quality, meat and milk production, but also for our understanding about the evolution of mammals.
Professor Shoba Ranganathan, Chair of Bioinformatics in the Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences, and PhD student, Elsa Chacko, were among several Australian researchers invited to join the team by the CSIRO, one of the international group of institutions which provided funding for the project.
The Macquarie researchers were part of the annotation team. Genome annotation is the process of identifying and attaching biological information to the DNA sequences for each of the chromosomes in an organism.
In this instance, the cattle genome contains almost 22 000 genes. Of that number, about 14 345 have counterparts in seven other mammalian species including humans, rodents, dogs and possums.
As well as having implications for the development of livestock and management of cattle populations, the genetic sequencing will also likely play a role in developing targeted medical treatments for human diseases.
With such a large group of scientists from 25 countries around the world working on the cattle genome project, regular communication was also a key priority – or as Ranganathan remarked: “Plenty of weekly conference calls around 7 or 8 in the morning.”
Ranganathan and Chacko began their part of the six-year project 18 months ago. With particular expertise in alternatively spliced (AS) genes, they worked on the manual annotation of AS genes analysing 4567 AS genes and comparing them to human and mouse genomes.
They will also publish an additional paper on their findings within the next few months, Ranganathan said.
“We’ve made a significant contribution to the overall analysis and annotation of this large genome. Our specific results on transcriptome analysis will go into an additional paper, as there is too much information to be put into the main annotation paper,” Ranganathan said.
Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.
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