CQUniversity Associate Professor Ross Shepherd has just returned from an outside studies program, conducting genetics research at the Roslin Institute, south of Edinburgh, Scotland.

The Roslin Institute became a household name in 1996 with the birth of the lamb Dolly, the first cloned mammal in the world. Details at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_(sheep).

Ross Shepherd (centre) with Professor John Woolliams (Roslin Institute) and Professor Subramanya (University of Mysore, India)"It was a great opportunity to work with some of the world's leading researchers in statistical genomics research, like Professor John Woolliams and Dr Ricardo Pong-Wong," Dr Shepherd said.

"I have worked with Professor Woolliams before, which has resulted in international publications, so it was a great opportunity to do more collaborative research.

"The recent detection of thousands to millions of SNP (Single Nucleotide Polymorphism) markers in DNA and the dramatic improvements in high-throughput, low-cost genotyping technology have made it possible to collect large data sets which can be used to investigate genomic associations with important attributes of interest for any living species.

"The current research investigated fast new statistical methods for analysing genome-wide dense SNP marker data which has huge potential for use in genomic selection in animal breeding and for exploring genomic associations with complex human traits," Dr Shepherd said.

"I gave a seminar on my research at the Roslin Institute just before returning to Rockhampton in late December and plan to give further conference presentations in Australia and overseas in the near future."

One collaborative paper has already been published on the research and another couple of papers are being written for publication later this year.

Dr Shepherd hopes to get research funding to continue the collaborative research in Australia.