By Michelle Crean

A Killorglin man has won a prestigious prize, the Conway Festival Gold Medal, for his work on genetic research on TB in cattle.

PhD student, John O’Grady, was competing against 114 other researchers in UCD Conway Institute, a biomedical research institute in University College Dublin.

This early-stage research could identify potential biomarkers to develop new diagnostic tests for M. bovis infection and guide the breeding of livestock with enhanced bovine TB resistance.

The research being carried out by John and supervised by Professors David MacHugh, Claire Gormley, and Stephen Gordon will impact the global agricultural industry, which sustains significant economic losses due to M. bovis infection in cattle.

In the context of a One Health framework – in which the health of animals, humans and the environment are inextricably linked - understanding the response in cattle to M. bovis infection can help explain immunological responses during human TB.

“We created a pipeline for integrative genomic analyses using three types of data: high-resolution genomic variation and transcriptomic data generated by our group and external genome-wide association study data produced by scientists at Teagasc and the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation," the UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science, said.

"For this, we used samples of peripheral blood from cattle infected with M. bovis to perform a transcriptome wide association study. This is the first study of its kind in the context of bovine TB.”

John is in the first year of his doctoral studies funded by the SFI Centre for Research Training in Genomics Data Science. As part of his PhD, he will continue this research to see if there are commonalities in gene expression across breed groups. The genes that are overexpressed during M. bovis infection may be potential biomarkers for the development of new diagnostic tests for M. bovis infection.