In April 2019, we spoke with Gentec PhD student Robert Mukiibi about his experience working with Ireland’s Teagasc on a joint project to find biomarkers for feed efficiency in cattle (read that article here). He concluded that, having already lived in four countries as part of his studies, he was pretty open to any geographical location for pursuing his postdoc.
That location turned out to be Scotland. As of November 2019, Robert is a postdoc at The Roslin Institute, a world-leading institute for animal science research that is part of the University of Edinburgh. While Gentec has many close contacts and collaborations with the institute from which Robert might have benefited, he did this old-school. He applied for the position prior to his graduation from University of Alberta, interviewed, and got the job.
Robert’s research to date has been in beef cattle. At Roslin, he’s working on fish! Specifically, it’s an Aqua FAANG project on improving functional annotation of farmed fish genomes. His part will involve molecular characterization of disease-resistance in farmed seabass using multiple functional genomic tools (genome-wide association studies, coding and non-coding RNAseq analyses, epigenomic analyses and genomic predictions). This functional information will be integrated into genomic prediction models to enhance the genomic prediction accuracy for disease resistance in farmed seabass. The work package is led by Ross Houston, who is also chair of aquaculture genomics at Roslin. The Aqua FAANG project is led by CIGENE in Norway, and includes 24 partners spread over the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, The Netherlands, Greece and Germany.
“I was lucky,” Robert says. “Even though fish are new to me, I am able to carry over my experience and expertise in all the tools, techniques and technologies I learned at Gentec and Tegasc, in particular from the labs of my PhD supervisors Drs. Changxi Li and Sinead Waters. What will be new is working as one of several hundred employees, instead of the smaller groups at Gentec and Teagasc. I am excited to acquire new knowledge of the aquaculture world in Dr. Ross Houston’s lab.”
Another link is with the European FAANG project, BovReg, which includes Kinsella Composite cattle. Common activities, such as bioinformatics are being coordinated across FAANG projects, so Robert may well bump into some of his old friends at project events. (see PAG report).
Just before he arrived in Scotland, Robert’s publication (Liver transcriptome profiling of beef steers with divergent growth rate, feed intake, or metabolic body weight phenotypes), which features his Canadian and Irish supervisors as co-authors) won Editor’s Choice in the Journal of Animal Science. In this study, they employed transcriptomic analyses to identify genes and biological mechanisms associated to feed efficiency component traits in Angus, Charolais, and Kinsella Composite cattle. The study identified key processes related to liver nutrient metabolism (including amino-acid, carbohydrate and lipid metabolism) and immune-related processes related to feed-efficiency traits in beef cattle. In terms of the biological mechanisms, the results showed that underlying functions are largely the same across the three breed populations, however the genes within these functions or processes were majorly breed-specific.
Back in Ireland, Robert was mildly unimpressed by the daily wind and rain. He hasn’t exactly jumped from the frying pan into the fire but Edinburgh—facing the aptly-named North Sea—isn’t known for its palm trees and sunny beaches. We’ll have to wait for his verdict.