This is a gathering of many of the country’s stud sheep ram breeders.
Usually competitors for ram sales, we meet up each year to swap knowledge and learn from each other, the scientists and boffins with the aim of lifting the performance in our own stud flocks, that of our ram clients and consequently the whole of the New Zealand sheep industry.
To my shame I’d forgotten much about the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel who published his new theory on inheritance in the 1860s.
We forget that before Mendel anyone who bothered to consider just how we and everything else came into existence believed the age-old theory we were a mixing of parental essences, much like mixing blue and yellow to get green.
Then Mendel did his pea breeding experiments and proved discrete units of inheritance, which we now call genes. determine the traits we observe in an individual.
He believed it was single genes but we now know that for many characteristics it is often many genes that are involved.
We heard from Dr Steve Miller who used to run Agresearch’s beef genomics programme and is now based in the United States running the Angus Genetics research programme.
Instead of showing us pictures of the progeny, great and great great progeny of crosses between wrinkled and round peas he had slides showing DNA strands and how once split the influence of a grandparent can be quite different.
Steve reminded us though we have four grandparents the common misunderstanding that we inherit 25% of our DNA from each grandparent is wrong. It is on average but who among us is or admits to being average.
So, when you consider one of your children and think she is a lot like your own mother it is quite possible she has acquired far more than a quarter of your mum’s genome.
We stud breeders were dealing with these matters, which I’ve simplified as best I can, because we now have a tool about to go live that will greatly assist our selection decisions.
Those of us using Sheep Improvement’s breeding programme (and frankly it should be every stud breeder if their clients want quantifiable genetic improvement leading to improved sheep performance) will soon be using and talking to clients about Single Step.
It is a genetic evaluation method that incorporates genomic information from the DNA samples many of us take from our stud sheep and incorporates it with all the pedigree, performance and progeny data simultaneously.
Now the model is informed by actual genetic data as part of the inputs the programme will know what percentage a grandparent’s actual genetic contribution is without estimating at the average of 25% based on pedigree.
The selection lists will reflect that.
Just as importantly, Single Step enables the genetic potential of younger breeding animals to be identified much earlier and therefore speeds up genetic gain by years.
Mendel was unrecognised in his lifetime. He presented a couple of papers with his rules on inheritance but none of the scientists present recognised their importance.
If they had, Darwin wouldn’t have spent decades struggling to explain his own theories on evolution and being puzzled at the mechanism that allowed successive generations to acquire then pass on genetic benefits.
Mendel told one of his friends “My time will come”. And come it did.
Sixteen years after his death in 1900, three independent researching biologists rediscovered his work on inheritance and it quickly became the foundation of inheritance and genetics as we know it.
Mendel would have been tickled pink if he’d been sitting with us in Dunedin listening to some complex work that has resulted from his pea breeding experiments 160 years earlier.
