Scientists have assembled the first draft sequence of the sheep genome.
Meat and Wool New Zealand, AgResearch and Ovita this week announced that following completion of the sequencing of the sheep genome to threefold coverage, the first assembly of a draft sequence of the sheep genome had been achieved.
Meat and Wool's research and development manager Max Kennedy said that, when completed, the project would benefit both farmers and human health researchers.
He said the initial assembly of the interim low coverage sequence of the sheep genome was one step towards identifying DNA variants and also allowed scientists to use the sheep genome sequence for the first time.
It would eventually allow researchers to accurately position DNA variants on the genome.
Identifying those variants was the main goal of the next phase of the project, and would eventually provide tools for farmers to identify animals carrying genes with production, quality and disease traits.
AgResearch Invermay senior scientist John McEwan said the project had generated more than 9,700,000,000 bases of sequence from six sheep breeds, the largest sequence assembly project attempted in Australia and New Zealand.
The assembly had been created by New Zealand and Australian researchers who were part of the International Sheep Genomics Consortium, a collaboration between scientists from organisations in 16 countries.
The skim sequencing of the genome had been completed in seven months and used the latest sequencing methods at the University of Otago and the Human Genome Sequencing Centre at the Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, he said.
By late next year, researchers hoped to have mapped production traits to specific regions of the genome, with that knowledge able to be used commercially to select superior animals.
The sequence would be used by all sheep researchers, he said, and the flow-on effects of the research should benefit human health as well.