Agricultural science ready to create the ice-cream cow

By SIMON COLLINS in San Francisco

Two American companies say they have found a set of genes in cattle that may help New Zealand dairy farmers to develop specialist cows.

A small Maryland biotechnology company, MetaMorphix, and the giant meat company Cargill announced at the Bio 2004 conference in San Francisco last week that they had completed the first study of traits associated with the whole genetic structure of cattle.

They plan to use it initially to fine-tune the diets of beef cattle in US feedlots, using their genetic characteristics to set a diet for each animal.

But MetaMorphix chief executive Ed Quattlebaum told New Zealand venture capitalist Howard Moore that the genetic data could also be used to develop specialist cows for the various kinds of dairy products.

"If you are a cheese manufacturer, there are probably certain components of milk that you wouldn't want if you were using it for ice-cream or some other applications," he said.

"We believe we'll be able to provide markers for that particular use."

Mr Moore, executive director of Life Science Ventures, jointly owned by Auckland-based Direct Capital and AgResearch's commercialisation arm Celentis, said the apparent breakthrough was "really exciting".

Both AgResearch and Fonterra's biotech subsidiary, ViaLactia, are also working on matching genes in cows with traits such as milk yield and weight gain.

But Mr Moore arranged to meet the US companies after their press conference to see whether their data could also be used in New Zealand.

MetaMorphix bought data on the genetic structure of cattle, pigs and chickens in 2002 from Celera, the nearby Maryland business which, in 2002, was the first private company to sequence the human genome.

MetaMorphix is using a natural protein called myostatin that regulates muscle development to boost livestock production efficiency and improve the nutritional quality of meat.

It says the protein also has potential to help in treating human muscle diseases, type 2 diabetes and obesity.

Mr Quattlebaum said the new genetic data would be used to identify cattle which were worth feeding up, and the ones that were poor performers and not worth feeding as much.

Animals would be blood-tested, tagged with barcodes, genetically sequenced, and then Cargill could go online and analyse the results.

Cargill's director of animal productivity and genomics, Dr Albert Paszek, said it would take a year to 18 months to learn how to use the genetic data.

However, the two companies plan to make the data available commercially to other businesses and farmers after that.

The genetic data, combined with the eartag, may also provide the basis for tracing meat from the supermarket shelf back to the farm it came from if such traceability becomes a requirement in Europe or elsewhere.

MetaMorphix