What's happening in your area

DNA is the future!

Wednesday, 23 February 2005
Tectra's Canterbury Regional Manager, Alan Marshall looks at some developments in the use of DNA.

The importance of DNA technology in the sheep industry is increasing as methods are developed to screen individual sheep for the presence of a specific genetic characteristic which can be used by farmers in breeding programmes and in managing animal health treatment.


Canterbury Regional Manager, Alan Marshall

In particular Alan has been looking at a technology being developed by Ovita which uses DNA gene markers to find out the parentage of sheep. This is called the "Catapult Shepherd" and can genetically match lambs to sire and dam families. This helps ram breeders identify ewes and their lambs, at lambing time, without interrupting the bonding process. It also allows large numbers of ewes to be mated to top sires without the hassle of having to tag lambs at birth. It improves the accuracy of parentage and identification. 


Alan believes this technology will soon be used by many in the ram breeding fraternity, especially for larger businesses with many sheep, where business can be expanded quickly by finding and utilising superior sires. It will be excellent for traits where measurement is expensive or compromises production, such as footrot, FE testing and meat quality. It will also be used to increase the accuracy of estimating breeding values e.g. Loin Max.

According to Alan these developments are just the 'tip of the iceberg' for the benefits this type of technology will provide.

"We can look forward to many other DNA based tests. Parentage is just part of it. We will also be able to test for diseases, parasite resistance, increased muscle and even fibre diameter in wool. For the commercial farmer, in the future it may allow them  to cull out the bottom end of the flock for a single trait problem such as footrot, resistance to parasites and survival or cold tolerance."

Lincoln University already has one such test up and running which isolates animals vulnerable to footrot and is currently being extensively used by ram breeders.

DNA technology is set to play a key role in the wool harvesting industry.