AMES, IA – “This effort is the culmination of years of dreaming about such an opportunity and finally getting the data and money to make it happen,” said James E. Koltes, associate professor of animal science at the University of Iowa. State said.
Koltes is talking about a new project the USDA is sponsoring with his colleagues at Iowa State and several partner agencies to create a systematic catalog, or encyclopedia, of the DNA netherworld scientists call “regions.” genetic control” for livestock species. The research sets the stage for important research by identifying regulatory DNA changes that can be useful in breeding for better animal health and well-being.
“We’ve known for years that many of the genetic changes and traits that are useful for breeding are not actually genetic,” Koltes said. Most of the DNA in non-genetic regions is thought to be useless, but research shows that some of them have important functions – either genetic modification or epigenetic that changes the animal’s appearance and performance.
Epigenetic modification refers to chemical changes in DNA due to factors such as food or environmental conditions that change the way genes are expressed but do not change the DNA sequence, Koltes explained. This includes complex characteristics such as weight or even characteristics that make different species into species.
These gene-free regions are thought to comprise more than 90% of the animal genome. Studies in humans and mice, including those of the ENCODE Consortium, show that DNA regulatory regions can control how genes are turned on and off, controlling important growth processes across a wide range of organism life and differentiation of tissues and cell types.
“I’m also working on understanding how genetics affects changes in nutrition from animal to animal in dairy cows,” Koltes said. “That’s a very complex trait, and it’s possible that the region of DNA that controls the part is not what we’ve thought of as a gene.”
Koltes said the new offering will focus on cattle, pigs and sheep, although the team’s DNA-coding software could work for other species. Their ultimate goal is to help increase genetic diversity by creating new “space-source” databases that assign known or potential functions to specific DNA sequences, and -provides the first map of animal control services for many species, as well as an online website. to be a home for information and training to facilitate its distribution.
“In addition to these practical tools, we’re really digging into the new science that can quickly go into applications,” he said.
The project has received $800,000 for the next three years from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the USDA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative. The new grant was born out of the Agricultural Genome to Phenome Initiative (AG2PI) seed project, Koltes said.
He will collaborate with other Iowa State animal scientists, including Professor Chris Tuggle, leader of the Annotation Project on Animal Genomes (FAANG), an internationally coordinated effort to generate and share high-quality information. about animal cells and friends. listing new jobs; and associate scientist Zhiliang Hu, tool development lead for animalgenome.org.
Other partners are:
- Zhiping Weng, the Li Weibo Chair in biomedical research at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, a data scientist at ENCODE and the developer of SCREEN, the main software that will be used for animals in this project. ENCODE, which started about a decade ago to focus on the human genome, is a similar project to FAANG for domestic animals.
- Mallory Freeberg, Human Genomics Group Leader, European Bioinformatics Institute and Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL-EBI).
- Brenda Murdoch, assistant professor in the Department of Animal, Veterinary and Food Sciences at the University of Idaho.
- Chris Elsik, professor of animal science at the University of Missouri.
Callers:
James Koltes, Department of Animal Science, 515-294-8274, jekoltes@iastate.edu
Chris Tuggle, Department of Animal Science, 515-294-4252, cktuggle@iastate.edu
Ann Y. Robinson, Agriculture and Life Sciences Communications, 515-294-3066, ayr@iastate.edu
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