Meeting Report for "Animal health in the post-genomics era" held on

24^th November 2006

The goal of this meeting, held by Euroscicon, was to enlarge the knowledge about host-pathogen interactions in agricultural species, because it gives us a realistic opportunity to identify disease resistance genes.

Peter Kaiser’s (Head of the Avian Genomics group at the Institute for Animal Health) project aims to identify the molecular components of the immune system that are shared between mammals and birds. The studies try to understand the  bird’s immune response (particularly the repertoire of immune response genes and its innate immune response) and identifying disease resistance genes . Once the genes, have been identified the study will focus on single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in these genes between different lines of chickens.

Differences have been observed in antibody production: they identified 40 SNPs on cytokine genes in the coding or regulatory regions. Further studies will try to understand if these SNPs confer functional differences and if those explain the differential Antibody responses to vaccination.

“Livestock have a number of advantages; their population structure makes for efficient linkage analysis and high levels of linkage disequilibrium”, says Michael Stear (University of Glasgow). Diseases are more challenging than production traits, they are rare, their genetic architecture probably differs, there are likely to be fewer genes with more interactions and they are time dependent .The research focused on the parasite distribution and variation among lambs.

Harry Noyes (University of Liverpool) has mapped QTL in mice and cattle that are associated with response to infection. Using SNP data he is trying to identify associations with infections (Trypanosomiasis) and to focus the networks that respond differently to infection in susceptible animals. One of the primary aims is to understand and to control disease.

Many homologues of known mammalian cytokines are known to exist in fish; in vertebrates, adaptive or specific immune responses are also present. Is the network as complex as in 'lower' vertebrates relative to 'higher' vertebrates? However, while it is clear that novel cytokines genes do exist in fish, it is debatable whether the cytokine network of fish is as complex as higher vertebrates, since expansion of different cytokine family members has occurred in each.

Studies of the behavior of CD4+ T-cells in the intestinal mucosa of the pig are relevant to humans, since the evolutionary relationships between the molecules can be determined.  Michael Bailey (University of Bristol,) using multiple, fluorochrome-tagged monoclonal antibodies studied of the interactions between cells in mucosal tissue.

Stephen Bishop (Roslin Institute Edinburgh, UK), studied genetic variation in innate immunity traits in growing pigs from the Meishan and Large White breeds.  They have successfully demonstrated consistent genetic and phenotypic correlations between PBML (peripheral blood mononuclear leucocyte) levels and growth rate.

The research (E. Glass, Roslin Institute Edinburgh, UK) also focused on host responses to a tropical protozoan parasite, Theileria annulata, which resides in macrophages, and alters host genes expression which results in phenotypic changes as well as a reversible transformation of the host cell.