Partner 13 - University of Berne (UBERN)

University of Berne, Switzerland combines animal genetics, nutrition and physiology of animals as well as animal housing. The expertise and successes of the institute in these fields have been shown through the well-educated students, the large number of publications and the significant amount of resources allocated in the past. The institute’s expertise and excellence shows to be of great advantage for our proposed three generation feeding experiment with focus on the inheritance of epigenetic modifications of the DNA and their effects on gene expression and carcass traits in the pig. At our institute we perform state of the art expression analysis including real-time PCR, Northern blot analysis, in vitro assays and non-array expression methods such as differential display assay. Further we have extended expertise in gene mapping, DNA sequencing as well as in methylation-sensitive representational difference analysis (MS-RDA) and bisulphite sequencing to execute the pioneering project. We have considerable expertise in epigenetics and in particular in the imprinting region about the IGF2 gene. Recently we were involved in the demonstration of a quantitative trait nucleotide (QTN) in the IGF2 gene for muscle mass and showed in addition that IGF2 antisense transcript expression was also affected by the QTN. Altogether these are excellent requirements to perform successfully this ambitious project.

Involved in:
WP2

Key staff in SABRE:
Martin Braunschweig UBERN-SABRE Coordinator
Gaudenz Dolf
Tosso Leeb

www.unibe.ch

http://www.genetics.unibe.ch/content/index_eng.html