A few months ago in Golden Helix’s 2nd Annual Abstract Challenge, Dr. Raluca Mateescu tied for third place with her entry on the palatability of beef. We mentioned in our previous post highlighting all of the challenge winners that Dr. Mateescu would be presenting her work for the Golden Helix community and the time has come! Next week for our monthly webinar, Wednesday, July 8th, Raluca will present “Genomic Analyses on the Palatability of Beef”. (Want to join? Register here.) As a preface to the webcast, we wanted to provide you with a short introduction to Dr. Mateescu and her research goals.
As an Associate Professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Florida, Dr. Mateescu’s research is focused on the biological traits of beef cattle, sheep, and goat molecular genetics. Her overarching goal is to unravel the genetic basis for the phenotypic variability in biological traits of economic importance that have a complex inheritance. But what does that really mean?
Advances in the animal genomics field are paving the way to improve animal production efficiency and animal products, leading to an improvement in human health. Overall, Dr. Mateescu is focused on providing practical applications for industries, from improving the health value of beef for humans to the ability to increase milk production in sheep.
For example, according to an article in the Angus Journal, Mateescu says that increasing the iron concentration in beef is one way to improve the health value which could serve to solve the issue of iron deficiency many humans face. Additionally, an increase in iron would also improve the color stability and shelf life of beef in stores.
In her upcoming webinar, Dr. Mateescu will focus on the use of our SVS software to perform genome-wide association studies for individual traits describing beef palatability, identify chromosomal regions associated with these traits, estimate genomic breeding values and predict the accuracy of GEBV for palatability traits in beef. It’s not one you are going to want to miss, so register now!