My research seminar report

On Thursdays we have our Division seminar at the institute. Doing my research in computation biology most talk I am attending to are bioinformatics talks. Yesterday's talk was entitled "Improving Wool through pharmaceutics". I am personally no fan of pharmaceutics neither any kind of drugs. But I was curious what this guy was up to.
I didn't know that Australia is the biggest wool producer in the world hosting more thann 100 million sheep. Wow, this country has soo much space for a reason ;o) To be honest, I haven't seen one sheep yet, but I have only seen parts of Queensland and mainly cities.
However, why improving the wool quality? Like in every business money is the key driver. The better the quality, the more cash you can ask for. The most important features of wool are fleece weight, staple length fibre diameter and color. These feature you can measure. And you can only change things you can measure ... Lords and Mechanics, here we come ;)


So, how can you improve the quality? If I undersood right, Metyrapone is the pharmaceutic that is given to lambs. This obviously improves the wool quality for at least 2years. According to wikipedia:

Metyrapone (Metopirone) is a drug used in the diagnosis of adrenal insufficiency and occasionally in the treatment of Cushing's syndrome (hypercortisolism).

What has this to do with the wool of a poor baby sheep? Yeah ... this is what they are trying to find out at our institute. Which gene is affected? And what is inhibited or enhanced when you give this drug.

For me that is a very unusal topic but still interesting.