For crop farmers, Roundup Ready and other gly-phosate resistant crops have been like a silver bullet for dispatching weeds.
But hog producers were recently told they shouldn’t expect scientists to find a similar “magic marker” in pigs to end the diseases that can sweep through barns and cripple farms.
“It’s just very complex. I think you would be naïve to believe that there would be one, two, three or a handful of markers when there are thousands of genes involved and those genes are interacting with each other,” Dave McLaren, a senior breeder with PIC North America, told the recent Manitoba Swine Seminar.
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“They’re not just working alone. It’s a complex problem.”
Many farmers have been alarmed by the level of legal control over crops that the technological revolution has handed breeding companies.
However, McLaren said he doubts animal breeding companies will be able to successfully tie up crucial genetic material with patents the way companies have done with crops. While a particular disease may be able to be controlled by a small element of an animal’s genetic code, disease resistance isn’t the product of a single gene or a few genes that can be identified by simple markers.
“The more researchers have worked in that area, the more layers that have been peeled off the onion, we keep finding more and more complexity in that underlying genetic architecture,” McLaren said.
“Most of the things we’re looking at are the ability of pigs to respond to immune challenge, viruses, bacteria, in a way that is not disruptive to their growth performance and their efficiency.”
Even if a company finds a way to patent a way to test for a gene, other methods can be used to identify it.
McLaren said he thinks companies like his will focus on making discoveries and then rely on their expertise to breed pigs that contain valuable attributes, while keeping their research as secret as possible by non-patent means.
“Our company’s philosophy going forward is that we will discover these things and use them as trade secrets,” McLaren said.
“We think it’s all about speed of implementation, not ownership and control …. I don’t think anyone is going to be able to own and control the technology.”
If research between companies like his is done in partnership with universities and other public sector organizations, the research will probably be made public immediately, but private research can be kept private.
McLaren said he can see a future in which breeds stop being the basis of breeding as scientists burrow into the pig genome and rely on genetic analysis rather than breed identification.
“The breed barriers start breaking down.”
However, McLaren said he hopes the breeding industry is careful to not winnow out too many types of pigs because even if some don’t appear promising, the long-term potential of the pig genome relies upon diversity.
“The key thing will be to maintain all of the genetic variation,” McLaren said.
“With the industry worldwide, that is an issue. If you lose that gene pool you can’t recreate the variation.”
