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Helen Newton Turner Workshop

Welcome

Dear colleagues,

It is a great pleasure for us to host this workshop in Pune, Maharashtra. Pune sits on the Deccan Plateau an area where some 20 million Deccani sheep play an integral role in the agricultural systems. We hope that you will enjoy the science, some of the big city attractions of Pune, and also the countryside which we will visit during the workshop.

We have a great line-up of speakers for you from around the world, and the papers they present will be peer reviewed and available in full length in a published workshop proceedings. Between these and the workshop sessions we plan to thoroughly review our current understanding of the FecB gene and re-evaluate the possibilities it offers for genetic improvement of reproductive rate in sheep from a very practical perspective. The specific objectives of the workshop are:

  1. To review current knowledge of the FecB gene and its worldwide application in sheep breeding
  2. To present the key results of the ACIAR projects related to the FecB gene in India 1998-2007
  3. To assist Indian Government policy makers to formulate policy regarding the wider dissemination of the FecB gene in the national flock
  4. To consider the implications of the workshop findings for countries other than India.

Please take the time to look at the information we provide on the other pages about the venue and the workshop. Although we have some 20 invited speakers we also invite papers relevant to the FecB gene and its application. These will be published as 1-page short papers, and presented as posters or orals at the workshop.

We look forward to seeing you at the workshop

Steve Walkden-Brown
Chanda Nimbkar
Julius Van der Werf
Vidya Gupta


Background

The idea of the holding this workshop arose during the 2007 project coordination meeting for ACIAR project AH-2002-038 and was enthusiastically embraced. We felt it would be a good capstone on more than a decade of research in India on improved meat sheep production supported by ACIAR, the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research

This work had a strong focus on genetic improvement of reproductive rate and was initiated in 1993 at the Nimbkar Agricultural Research Institute (NARI) at Phaltan, near Pune, with the purchase of prolific Garole sheep from the Sunderbans regions of West Bengal. Mr Bon Nimbkar, the founder of NARI had established the Animal Husbandry Division of NARI in 1990. He contacted Dr Helen Newton Turner the celebrated Australian sheep geneticist and advocate of genetic improvement of reproductive rate in sheep. Alhough Dr Newton Turner was unable to visit NARI, Dr Douglas Gray who was visiting India at the time was able to do this, and from this start with some seed money from ACIAR, and involvement of molecular geneticists from the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) in Pune, a new project was born.

That project, ACIAR AS1-1994-022, only commenced funding in 1998 shortly before Douglas Gray left the University of New England (UNE), the commissioned organisation for the project, and passed the project leadership on to Dr Steve Walkden-Brown. Between 1998 and 2008 there was an unbroken period of support ACIAR support for the work through an extension to the original project, a new project AH-2002-038, and an extension of funding to that project. During this period, it was established that:

  • The prolificacy of the Garole breed was due to the FecB gene which appeared to be fixed in the breed
  • The Garole and its first cross offspring were not suitable for the local sheep raising system
  • The Garole and its crosses exhibited strong genetic resistance to worm infection
  • Crossbred ewes carrying the FecB gene had increased prolificacy, but the increase in ovulation rate and litter size was generally lower than reported elsewhere. The increase appeared manageable under traditional management practices and of economic benefit to shepherds.

It is this final outcome, based on extensive work with participating shepherds since 2003, which has been the major stimulus for this workshop.

Major sponsors and acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences (ATSE) International Science Linkages - Science Academies Program, which is part of the Australian Government Innovation Statement, Backing Australia's Ability for their financial support for the workshop.

The major participating organisations are also contributing significant in-kind support to the workshop. We also acknowledge funding from the Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India and thank Ms Ilona Schmidt for her support in creating these web pages.

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