The dairy industry has come a long way since the early days, when cows were hand-milked and milk was delivered to homes fresh in glass containers. Nowadays, scientific advancements have helped dairy farmers increase their yields, keep their cows healthier, and turn a bigger profit. But the advancements in genetics have also shown dairy farmers how one rogue gene can have a huge impact on an entire species.
That gene originated in Chief, a bull who, according to The Atlantic, had 16,000 daughters, 500,000 granddaughters and 2 million great-granddaughters. Chief was a very popular bull, as you might imagine, and his sperm helped to increase dairy industry profits by $30 billion over the course of three and a half decades. He was known for producing daughters who yielded a lot of milk, but he also spread another gene through his offspring that led to some serious problems for the dairy industry.
In the past 10 years, geneticists have begun using advanced gene sequencing techniques to help dairy farmers breed cows that have desirable qualities, like the ability to produce a lot of milk. Through their gene research, they also discovered that there were some oddities among Chief’s descendants. There was a particular genetic marker among many of the cow population that hailed from Chief that left scientists with questions. Some cows had one copy of this gene, and some had none, but no cows had both a copy from her mother and one from her father. Since Chief’s sperm had helped to create nearly 14% of all current DNA in cows, it was odd that none of his descendants had two copies of the marker—both from their father and mother who had descended from Chief.
Scientists discovered that when this genetic marker did show up in a cow’s DNA both from the mother and the father, it caused cows to die in the womb. That’s why none of the living cows had two copies of the marker. After some estimation and a lot of math, geneticists determined that the genetic mutation had caused 500,000 cows to die in the womb, and cost the dairy industry an estimated $420 million.
Now that genetic sequencing has become a common facet of the dairy industry, scientists don’t believe they’ll ever see a phenomenon quite like Chief again. And while the dairy industry is still holding firm from the successful lines of cows that Chief helped to create, they might have done even better if they could have pocketed that $420 million.
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