Studying genetics in animals has become a significant part of Brenda Murdoch’s career.
She has written numerous genetic essays, studied genetic evaluation and has been an associate professor at the University of Idaho for nearly seven years in the Department of Animal, Veterinary and Food Sciences. Now she will be leading the $500,000 sheep genome project.
The main objective of the project is to better understand the relationship between genetic makeup and environmental exposure in a variety of sheep breeds. The goal is to understand the base genetic difference in these different breeds of sheep, and how they result in the different biological traits people are interested in.
“Some of them are things that we want to select against, and some we want to select for, like disease resistance, better milk production,” Murdoch said. “But all of that is driven from that base genome, and right now, in the case of sheep, we only have the information for a certain breed, as opposed to multiple.”
The project has been in the works for a little over a year. It developed last year when researchers were awarded the $500,000 grant and began at the beginning of this year. It is an international grant funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Murdoch and researchers work closely with USDA in Pullman, Clay Center, Nebraska and Beltsville, Maryland. They also are collaborating with Utah State University, Roslin Institute in Scotland and an agricultural research center in New Zealand.
Sheep were chosen to be the project’s focus because of the sheep industry’s importance to the state of Idaho and their biological diversity.
“We’re trying to understand those different mechanisms, and sheep are a really good model to understand them,” Murdoch said.
Murdoch feels the project will be beneficial in the long run for a variety of reasons. Understanding genomes and a more basic level can help to understand how to select for or against certain traits, like disease resistance, milk production or increased adiposity.
“If we can understand at the mechanistic level how all of those biological things come about, then we can do better not only with our food production species, but also with our health,” she said.
What interested Murdoch about the study was the biotechnology involved and being able to answer interesting biological questions. Additionally, she is interested in understanding how the biological traits that makeup who individuals are can help lead to an understanding on how to make better choices.
“I am looking forward to doing a bunch of cool science with a bunch of cool technology, working with a bunch of great scientists, and hopefully a bunch of great students who want to be trained in this area,” she said. “Hopefully we can deliver some important information to the sheep industry in Idaho and the U.S. in general.”
Murdoch is excited to train young students and to be able to teach them to go out in the industry and be good representatives of the institutional knowledge they gain.
If students have any questions about the project, or are interested in being a part of it, Murdoch can be reached through email.
Bailey Brockett can be reached at [email protected]