On Dec. 18, the annual committee conference of the Science and Technology Commission of Ministry of Education (S&T Commission of MOE) was held in Beijing, releasing the list of the "Top 10 S&T Progress in Chinese Universities Award” in 2012. The Project of “The yak genome and adaptation to life at high altitude”, completed by Pro. Liu Jianquan’s research team from the School of Life Sciences and National Key Lab. of Grassland Agro-ecosystems, was selected into the list, which is the first time for LZU to win the award.
The "Top 10 S&T Progress in Chinese Universities Award” has been innaugurated since 1998. 10 remarkable research achievements each year are assessed by the S&T Commission of MOE, in order to promote S&T innovation and innovative personnel and extend major S&T achievements in universities.
Intro. to the project of “The yak genome and adaptation to life at high altitude”:
An international consortium, led by Prof. Liu Jianquan in Lanzhou University, comprising researchers from BGI, the world’s largest genomics organization, Institute of Kunming Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences as well as the other 12 institutes, has completed evolutionary analyses of the genetic bases for yak to survive at high altitude based on the genomic sequence of a female yak. This important research was recently published by an article entitled “The yak genome and adaptation to life at high altitude” on Nature Genetics on July 1, 2012 (http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v44/n8/index.html). This work was partly funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (30725004 and 40972018 to Jianquan Liu).
As a standard symbol of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) and high-altitude, yak (Bos grunniens) is the most important animal species for Tibetans and other nomadic pastoralists in the QTP and adjacent high-altitude regions. Yaks have provided them not only the basic food resources, i.e., meats and milks, but also transportations, fuels (yak dung), and accommodation tents. ‘No domestic yak, no conquest of the QTP by human beings’ as suggested by a popular saying. In particular, yak has a very closely related relative, as we all know, cattle. Cattle could not survive at high altitude. Compared with cattle, yak has many anatomical and physiological traits that enable it to live at high altitude, including high energy metabolism, impressive foraging ability, enlarged hearts and lungs, and lack of hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction when faced with relatively low oxygen conditions. Therefore, the comparison between yak and cattle has become as a standard model for understanding high-altitude adaptation. As pointed out by the researchers, the determination of the key genes in the natural high-altitude adaptation in yak will be highly useful to improve current understanding, treatment and prevention of altitude sickness and other hypoxia-related diseases in humans. In addition, the yak genome sequence together with the many SNPs recovered in this study will facilitate genetic dissection of agronomically important traits in the species and accelerate the genetic improvement of milk and meat production of this essential livestock to the Tibetan people and economy.
This research has aroused a widespread interest over the world. When the work was published online, Science Now's Science-Shot made a timely comment by the title “What gets yaks high” at its homepage (scienceshot-what-gets-yaks-high.html). Since then, numerous institutes, news webs, newspapers and magazines reported this exciting work.
