A collaborative project involving University of Otago researchers and AgResearch scientists has shown sheep to be a good model for investigating kidney disease - a debilitating and sometimes terminal disease in humans which is on the rise worldwide.
Sheep, mice and humans are known to suffer from Meckel-Gruber syndrome.
This is a rare disease in humans, which affects multiple organs, particularly the kidneys, and often results in massive polycystic kidneys and early death, usually in childhood.
Prof Michael Eccles, of the Otago University pathology department, believes studying sheep with the syndrome could also shed new light on an aggressive form of cancer in humans.
Prof Eccles is not sheepish about the potential value of ovine genetic studies, but some of his friends and colleagues do point out the slightly humorous side of his work, in a country with about four million people and about 40 million sheep.
"Certainly, my international colleagues find it pretty amusing that I'm working in New Zealand on sheep," he said.
"The New Zealanders are intrigued, especially my clinical colleagues."
He became interested in kidney disease in sheep when a Southland farmer was losing a high percentage of his lambs from polycystic kidney disease in the late 1990s.
Affected sheep were subsequently bought and they have since been studied at Invermay.
Prof Eccles set out to identify the gene related to the disorder in these sheep and has teamed up with AgResearch senior scientist John McKewan, who has provided access to a powerful new form of technology, a sheep SNP chip, which is capable of scanning about 50,000 genetic predispositions at once.
A joint AgResearch and Otago University grant of $100,000 will enable promising genetic regions to be further refined and sequenced to identify the mutant gene responsible for the disorder in the affected flock.
The Meckel-Gruber sheep will, in future, help advance research into mechanisms and treatment for renal fibrosis in humans, which is recognised as an integral part of the structural changes to the kidney in chronic progressive renal failure.
This is one of several joint AgResearch and Otago University projects being undertaken at the new Centre for Reproduction and Genomics, which opened at Invermay last year.
