Bovine Genomics From Academia to Industry

Two multistate United States Agricultural Experiment Station projects, North Central (NC)-1010 and National Research Support Project (NRSP)-8, collaborated on a joint presentation at the PAGXIII conference in San Diego, CA. The joint session consisted of presentations on current and future technologies for ruminant research. Topics ranged from genome discovery to tool applications. The current state of the art in bovine and ovine research is near that seen in the model organisms, although research methods may be a few steps back of many near future technologies that researchers of model organisms are currently developing (see the section on Trey Ideker for an example). Current problems that need immediate attention are those of implementation of research findings and education of producers as to how they might implement the results of quantitative trait loci (QTL) scans and candidate gene searches. The outcomes of the committee indicate that bioinformatics and computational biology approaches in both tool development and tool usage will be major areas of emphasis for the next few years. The following review will highlight information that was presented in the areas of genetic markers, gene mapping and sequencing, bioinformatics, functional genomics, as well as industry perspectives. Summaries of the NC-1010 and NRSP-8 committees will also be presented.