Australia to play role in bovine genome project

A $100 million international project to sequence the bovine genome is being launched following an intensive lobbying effort in which CSIRO played a key role.

Australia is among a handful of countries underwriting the cost of the Bovine Genome Project (BGP), whose expected conclusion in late 2005 should shower benefits on livestock industries worldwide.

However, Australia's sheep and cattle industries declined to contribute to the costs of launching the project, according to disappointed Australian lobbyists for the venture.

The project will make the bovine genome the third major one to be successfully sequenced (after the human and mouse) and will generate rapid improvements in desirable production characteristics in livestock.

The AUD$1.5 million Australian contribution will come entirely from CSIRO and will place Australia's livestock in a strong position to reap market advantages, according to CSIRO Livestock Industry chief Shaun Coffey.

Sequencing the genome will "significantly" increase the gross annual value of livestock-derived products in Australia, currently pegged at about $15 billion, he said.

The ability to identify and exploit genes controlling growth efficiency, muscle development and milk composition, as well as breeding disease-resistant cattle and sheep are among expected benefits from the project.

The project will produce "a quantum leap in our rate of progress," according to CSIRO senior research scientist Dr Ross Tellam, who helped spearhead an 18-month overseas and domestic lobbying effort for the project.

Australia is well-placed to capitalise on the information generated by the project because it has the necessary infrastructure and expertise to maximise the gains from the sequencing, he said.

However, Tellam said he was unable to secure financial support for the project from Australian livestock industry groups.

"I would have like to see the dairy, sheep and meat cattle people contribute... but domestically we weren't successful in raising funds from them," he said.

One reason for their reluctance might be a desire to husband their research resources in order to capitalise on the genome information when it becomes available.

The major nations supporting the project are the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Peripheral support has come from the UK, Norway and Brazil.

The international flavour of the project helped drive its acceptance and ensure it received high priority from the National Human Genome Research Institute, Tellam said.

The National Human Genome Research Institute is the US agency whose cooperation was vital in order to secure the technical resources demanded by the project. It is also contributing half the total cost.

The genome will be deciphered at a major sequencing centre in the US starting at the end of this calendar year. Only a few such centres exist and the likely candidate for the BGP is reportedly Baylor University in Texas, although no formal announcement has yet been made.

Correlating the bovine genome project's findings with human genomic information could facilitate development of new medicines and diagnostic tests for a wide range of human diseases and medical conditions.

The government-backed project will also guarantee bovine sequence information remains in the public domain where it will be freely accessible to all interested researchers.

"Intellectual property rights will be derived from how we use the sequence, not from the sequence itself," Tellam says.

That could avoid situations like the one in which US company Ceres is claiming patents over 50,000 genes, according to Dr Richard Jefferson, founding CEO of the non-profit Centre for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture (CAMBIA), in Canberra.

Writing in the current issue of Australian Science, Jefferson made the claim as part of a critique of the use of intellectual property to stifle innovation in genetic technology.