Developed through FarmIQ funding, the Ovine Infinium SNP chip is a high-density chip that packs 600,000 individual nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) into its structure.
As a technology it represents a significant increase on the “50K” chips developed three years ago.
SNP is a variation in the DNA sequence between individuals of the same species.
The Infinium chip’s technology has enabled researchers to profile a diverse range of traits in a sheep’s DNA and for the first time across a variety of breeds.
FarmIQ chief executive Collier Issacs said the ability to pack more traits and SNPs into the chips provided breeders and researchers with information identifying traits making particular sheep better performers from farmers’ and marketers’ perspectives.
LOADING UP: Researchers aim to load the phenotype characteristics of 8000 lambs on the chips by the end of this spring and compare the results of these sheep and their known traits against unknown animals to check chip accuracy.
“There is always the risk you can identify those traits that work well onfarm, but don’t deliver a good product on the plate. But research is showing so far this is not the case – you can achieve at both ends,” Issacs said.
Researchers aim to load the phenotype characteristics of 8000 lambs on the chips by the end of this spring and compare the results of these sheep and their known traits against unknown animals to check chip accuracy.
So far the AgResearch team at Invermay, led by John McEwan, has tested 5000 lambs.
“It is like building a key. You have to feed the known animals’ traits in and then you can compare to unknown animals’ traits,” Issacs said.
The chips have phenotypes for 28 traits loaded into them, including reproduction, growth rate, disease resistance, and longevity.
However, the “plate” end of the animal’s value is also able to be evaluated now. That includes meat yield and eating quality and building a database on correlation between these traits will help determine sire breeding values for them.
The traits had already played a key part in sourcing sheep stock for Silver Fern Farms’ consumer range of sheep-meat products, Issacs said.
He acknowledged there were challenges with the technology in ensuring that even when the “nature”, or genetic traits, of an ideal animal were identified, “nurture” still played a critical part in ensuring genetic potential played out.
“It is a case of ensuring the sheep are fed well onfarm and at the end the processing of the carcase is done properly to ensure you don’t undo all the work done with identifying the good genetics.”
“There is always the risk you can identify those traits that work well onfarm but don’t deliver a good product on the plate. But research is showing so far this is not the case – you can achieve at both ends.”
Collier Issacs
FarmIQ
He said it was difficult for New Zealand farmers to walk the line between maximising genetics once identified and still feeding sheep adequately in a low-cost pastoral system.
But if the sheep were worth more because of genetics identifying their better eating quality and higher-yielding carcases, it was possible farmers might ultimately get away with carrying fewer stock per hectare.
The other challenge lay in commercialising the genetics technology to ensure the cost returned to the sheep breeders using it.
“At present the value the genetic tests provide is usually gained by the commercial breeder buying the rams identified with the tests,” Issacs said. “The question is how do we transfer some of the benefit back to the breeder?”
He contrasted the staged chain of sheep genetics to the vertically integrated chain for the poultry and pork industries.
He suspected the driver for the uptake of the genetics would be through consumers demanding lambs that delivered a better eating experience, as determined by the genetic chip identification.
Renowned United States animal production researcher Dorian Garrick said the chip represented a useful research tool.
He said if it could be used in large enough populations of sheep the cost would come down and could become routine for use in ram breeding flocks.
