News

14th November 2011

UK Texel breeders to benefit from cross-hemisphere genomic research

As a result of a unique piece of work being pioneered both in the UK and New Zealand, UK Texel breeders should be among the first sheep breeders in the world to be able to take advantage of genomic selection tools when they become available.

The work, which is being undertaken in New Zealand by AgResearch scientists funded by Ovita, has seen DNA samples taken from close to 300 progeny sires in the UK and a further 10,000 animals in New Zealand of which several hundred are purebred Texels and more than 1000 have some Texel genetics, explained British Texel Sheep Society chief executive John Yates.

“Genomics will allow a DNA sample to be used to directly estimate breeding values for certain traits. To formulate and refine the prediction equations requires large numbers of well recorded animals, ideally progeny tested sires, which is something the Texel breed has in both the UK and New Zealand and indeed in many other parts of the world.”

And with both the UK and New Zealand having recorded similar traits in their performance recording programmes the challenge now is to obtain sufficient Texel animals with highly accurate breeding values so as the prediction equations already developed in New Zealand on several closely related breeds and crossed derived from the UK can be extrapolated into the Texel breed.

“Hopefully by combining the dataset from both countries more robust predictions can be achieved and the work can be sped up. The UK data is robust in itself, with the Texel breed now accounting for the single largest number of recorded sheep in the country and recorded flocks accounting for more than 15,000 birth notifications to the British Texel Sheep Society a year.

“This year has seen a 27% increase in the number of recorded Texel flocks and tellingly, the breed champion at the Scottish National Sale was the first prize winner from the performance recorded class, proving that type and performance are being delivered by the current recording system,” explained Mr Yates.

Additionally, the Texel breed will be the reference point for all global genome sequencing in sheep. The research is based on two separate sheep, one pure Texel male from the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh, and a Texel from China. Texels will, therefore, be the reference point for genome sequencing in sheep and all subsequent sheep genomic research will be based on what is found in the Texel breed.