For generations, farmers have been focused on improving livestock for better yields per animal. They’ve also worked hard to ensure that more animals survive various environmental threats, from diseases to droughts. Their noble fight has always been against human starvation. But now some are looking to not only feed humans, but to improve human health too.
This is a remarkable and important shift in thinking: from producing simply safe-for-human-consumption food to proactively aiding and promoting human health.
Sure, farmers have always been concerned with producing safe food and that’s not going to change. But how do they produce more than that to the benefit of the human race?
An editorial in the journal Nature Genetics titled Marshaling the Variome suggests that a strong first step in that direction would be to share livestock and plant genomic knowledge with human genomic researchers for the expressed purpose of improving human health.
By extending human health studies to include animals, particularly livestock, and plant genomic data, researchers believe that the genetic answers to human diseases will be more quickly found than studying human genomes alone.
Why livestock genomic knowledge in particular? Because farmers have mastered many similar challenges in farm beasts by identifying and breeding the problems out. Back in the day, they did that by observing closely and managing breeding accordingly. Or, they learned from trial and error. Today, many farmers use sophisticated techniques in successfully breeding animals to overcome environmental obstacles and be resistant to diseases.
That is precisely the knowledge human genome researchers are trying desperately to discover and master. As Richard Cotton explains in the video below on the Human Variome Project, “finding the [genetic] fault in an inherited disease is like looking for a needle in a haystack unless you know where to look…” Comparison and other genomic studies with livestock genomes could be the fastest and best way to identify the problems in human DNA that cause inherited diseases so the genetic repairs can be made and the diseases cured.