Brasília – After six years of work, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), in partnership with an international consortium, has managed to reveal the sequencing of the bovine genome. The study should serve for the genetic improvement of cattle and may serve to increase the productivity and characteristics like tenderness, colouring and volume of fat as well as the quality of the milk and greater resistance to diseases and parasites, like ticks.
The study should be published on Monday (24) in North American magazine Science, considered the most influential in the scientific area. The sequencing work, assembly, analysis and annotation of the genome was worked on by over 300 scientists in 25 countries and cost US$ 54 million.
Researcher Alexandre Caetano, from Embrapa Genetic Resources and Biotechnology, who led the work of the Brazilian scientists, said that the work stands out as it brings new tools for improvement of the quality of cattle.
"What we have now is a new tool that didn’t exist before and that allows us to promote this process of evaluation and improvement in a faster and more efficient way and, eventually, covering questions that we could not cover before, bringing more productive efficiency and quality to the product and improving the quality of our products, both beef and dairy," he said, during the presentation of the study, yesterday, at the Embrapa offices.
According to Caetano, the technology developed in the research is already available, but for it to be applied efficiently in the country, some factors must be developed. "We need greater partnership with the great players in the productive chain to apply this work," he explained.
The researcher said that in other countries, like the United States, the main financer of the study, the integration between researchers and producers is older and the results tend to show up faster. However, he believes that these relations may be developed and producers may win, as one of the research objectives is the process of genetic improvement in a faster and cheaper way.
The study, in Brazil, also counted on the collaboration of researchers from the Ribeirão Preto Colege of Medicine and of the São Paulo State University.
*Translated by Mark Ament
