A Steak in Genomics™

       For those who have been scrolling through social media and various agriculture-based news outlets in the past 12 to 18 months, it may seem as though there has been quite a few “new” genetic mutations or defects that have been identified. For most producers this is something they have dealt with before. But for others this may be the first time they are being faced with what seems like a “sky is falling” predicament. Regardless of which group you belong to, understanding what genetic mutations are, how they happen, and what to do when they are identified may prove helpful for the future.      To put this into perspective, cattle have 30 pairs of chromosomes. They inherit one of each pair from their sire and the other from their dam. A typical cattle genome consists of 2.7 billion nucleotides (A, T, G, C), or pieces of DNA, each occurring again in a pair. When they come together to form a fertilized egg, or future fetus, that is 5.4 billion nucleotides that are replicated each tim