Philip George), we started discussing the potential of using genetic markers to predict breeding values. Fortunately, when talking to my undergraduate advisor (Dr. Long story short, I never had the discipline to do what it took to get into veterinary school, so I became a classic first semester senior with no plans. After examining my mating list (probably long enough to last 10 years) and figuring out what the ET bill would have been, I made the decision that I had to go to veterinary school to save some money by doing it myself. I could not wait to get them back to the farm and start making mating decisions and doing things like MOET, a technique that was just picking up momentum at the time. Fortunately, he indulged me, and we purchased three cows and four heifers. I even talked my dad into driving from Illinois to Idaho to purchase cows at the Twin V and Soldier Mountain dispersals. I guess you could have described me as an EPD nerd because I had nearly memorized all the EPDs of any potential AI sire in the Hereford breed. One of my greatest interests was the genetic evaluation of animals (e.g., Expected Progeny Differences, EPDS) and how it was used to make breeding decisions. The definition of how each of these variants impacts animal phenotypes allows the possibility of “designing” the genome of an animal through technologies such as genomic selection and gene-editing.Ī long, long time ago (the early-80s for those of you that were around), I started raising cattle. Furthermore, we have also begun to use intermediate molecular measures (gene expression, chromatin accessibility, metabolites, etc.) as phenotypes. Phenotypes can be even more variable ranging from simply inherited phenotypes such as genetic abnormalities to the complex inheritance of quantitative traits that may be controlled by 100s or 1000s of genes. In addition, these changes are not limited to changes in the actual DNA sequence, but also additional “marks” (methylation, histone modifications, chromatin structure, etc.) that can be present (i.e., epigenetics). If the focus of the research group could be captured in one simple sentence, it would be “We seek to understand the relationship between changes in the DNA molecule of an organism (the genome) and the phenotype of that organism.” Of course, this is oversimplified given the tremendous level and types of variability (SNPs, in-dels, CSV, CNV, etc.) across the genome of a species. What kind of work does your research group conduct?
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