A local pig known as T.J. Tabasco has become a key component in an international effort to better understand a pig’s genetic makeup as it relates to the human genome.

The research is bolstered by a two-year $10 million grant from the United States Department of Agriculture.

Key players in this research project are Lawrence B. Schook and Jonathan Beever, professors of animal science at the University.

“There has been a long-standing effort for the last five or six years which has led up to this (the most recent grant proposal),” Beever said.

Prior grants awarded through the Agriculture Department led to this grant, Beever said.

T.J. Tabasco’s DNA will provide the first sequence of the swine genome to be completed, which could have a lasting effect on the medical community.

The pig genome is of similar size, complexity and chromosomal organization to the human genome. Comparative genetic maps have indicated that the swine and human genomes are more closely related than the mouse and human genomes.

In the past, the use of pigs for biochemistry, enzymology, endocrinology, reproduction and nutrition research has contributed significantly to the continual improvement of human health. Present sequencing of pig DNA will likely further the use of the pig as a biomedical model to understand human obesity, female health, cardiovascular disease and communicable diseases. The possibility of more successful pig-to-human transplants is also a natural extension of this research.

“A pig is a human on four legs,” said Bruce Schatz, interim head of the department of medical information science for the University’s College of Medicine. “It is a great model to understand diabetes and the effects of alcohol.”

The project itself is slated to cost $20 million. This is dependent on a variety of financial contributors on national and global levels, partially from the pork industry.

“We’ve managed to get another $5 million worth of funding from industry,” Schook said.

Similar institutes in France and South Korea have also put forth funds, Schook said.

Sequencing of the 2.5 billion chemical base pairs that spell out a pig’s genetic code will be done at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom. The data, however, will be mined on campus at the Institute for Genomic Biology, 1207 W. Gregory Dr., which was established to deal with this type of research.

The building itself is presently under construction and is expected to be in use by the fall of 2006. Interest in this sub-category of biology spread so quickly at the University that campus leaders finally decided in the early 90s that an infrastructure of sorts was needed to coordinate academic efforts in genomic biology.

In 2000, then-Gov. George Ryan gave his support to what was then called the Post Genomic Institute, and in 2002 funding was released for the project that would eventually become the Institute for Genomic Biology. Gov. Rod Blagojevich broke ground on the construction site in June 2003.

Beever said he is quite optimistic about the ongoing research.

“In 24 months we will have a genome sequence of the pig,” Beever said.