farmOz.com

The Australian sheep industry is about to enter a new era that will offer faster, cheaper and more accurate breeding information. A new piece of technology called a SNP chip is in the final stages of development. The SNP chip is a small chip of glass that can hold up to 60000 known gene markers from sheep DNA. If validated, around a thousand of these gene markers will form the basis of an industry SNP chip, offering markers for the most sought after traits. These will then be embedded into Australian Sheep Breeding Values (asbvs) under the current suite of genetic improvement tools - namely LAMBPLAN and MERINOSELECT for all producers to use. DNA from a blood sample will show if any of the animals genes match the favourable genes on the industry 1000 SNP chip.

Tags: &, "Meat, agriculture, Australia, Cattle, chip, DNA, farm, gene, genetics, LAMBPLAN, livestock, MERINOSELECT, red, sheep, SNP

This entry was posted by Admin on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.