A Massive Study of Sheep Genes May Help Today's Breeders

Scientists in China, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nepal, Finland, and the United Kingdom collaborated on the study, to be published in the October print edition of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. They analyzed the complete mitochondrial DNA of 42 domesticated native sheep breeds from 10 countries around the world and two wild species from Kazakhstan, which were then compared to 150 breeds in other parts of the world.

The researchers found that Asian sheep are much more genetically diverse than those in the West, with traits they hope breeders around the world can exploit to their benefit – especially herders in developing countries who are looking to raise animals for meat, rather than wool, thanks to the ever-increasing global demand for meat and the decline in sheep wool prices over the last two decades.

“The kind of sheep we need in places like Mongolia and western China are animals that are strong and hardy and can cover long distances every day in search of grass,” says Jian-Lin Han, one of the authors of the study and a senior scientist working at the Joint Laboratory on Livestock and Forage Genetic Resources, in a release. “That’s not the kind of animal they’re producing in New Zealand and Australia.”

The domestication of sheep, one of the first animals to be tamed for human use, took place between 8,000 to 11,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, the half-moon shaped swath of the Middle East stretching from the Persian Gulf to modern day northern Egypt. The animals made their way east to China and Mongolia on the Silk Road.

The scientists discovered there was a second, later migration of unique Chinese and Mongolian sheep breeds, developed some 5,000 years ago, that came west with herders also on the Silk Road trading routes, and interbred with earlier varieties, which created even more distinct breeds.

The next step, say the researchers, is to take the information they have learned and use it to build better breeding programs for herders in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to produce animals suited to local conditions.

“In the world of animal husbandry, to get what you want you first need to know what you have,” says Olivier Hanotte, a livestock geneticist at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom and a collaborator on the study, in the release. “Until now, we barely knew anything about the genetic makeup of Asian sheep.”

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