[Jacob-list] no poop hole

[Ralene Mitschler]

Thanks for the info Melody!  Very interesting.  Oh how that family must have
dealt with all that; let alone how we deal with this in our sheep!

For some reason my biologist's brain is stuck in lecture mode this morning:
I think from what I have been reading over the years for my biology classes
that another piece of the puzzle is that all these sheep and human issues
are polygenic--meaning multiple genes involved.  I have learned that for a
number of diseases there are some examples of straight forward inheritable
patterns and some not.  SO I interpret that to mean that sometimes there is
something that occurs in our egg and sperm lines that is inheritable and
sometimes the problem happens despite having a 'good' copy of the genes.
The weakest part of the science database i think is how environmental
insults affect our/sheep DNA and mess things up.  The timeline involved is
SO hard to study because it can happen over such a variable timeline.

And of course for sheep and humans and everything else living on the
planet--the main piece of our complexity is the individual variability!  SO
much of our medical/veterinary science is based on population trends which
makes it hard to figure out the individual pattern sometimes.  My favorite
example of that is in immune system--how sheep can react differently to same
drug--the immune cells and their molecules are just a bit different in
combination in each of us!

I hope over the coming years that my students and I can do some basic
biology with my sheep to figure out some of this stuff.  I think we will
start with spots and horns and fleece patterns but I am not sure that is the
easy place to begin.  Another student is going to study parasites and may
try to figure out what the anti-worm drug resistance pattern is in our
Jacobs.  Will keep you posted if anything helpful happens!
Ralene

--
Ralene Mitschler
Chicory Lane Farm Jacob sheep
www.blueflowerflock.com
687 Oxford Ave
Hanover PA  17331
rmitschler at gmail.com
717.630.2988
717.817.3794 cell
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