A Critical Review on the Application of Veterinary Cytogenetics in Domestic Animals

Cytogenetics is the study of chromosomes; their structure and properties, chromosome behavior
during cell division, their influence on traits and factors which cause changes in chromosomes.
Veterinary cytogenetics is the application of cytogenetics to clinical problems that occur in animal
production. It has been applied to understand problems such as infertility and its types, embryonic and
fetal death, abnormality in sexual and somatic development and hybrid sterility and also prenatal sex
determination and other forms of chromosomal abnormalities. These are achieved through
conventional and banded karyotyping techniques and molecular cytogenetic techniques. Although
conventional techniques are still useful and very widely applied, the nature of cytogenetics has
gradually changed as a result of advances achieved in the molecular cytogenetic techniques for
example fluorescent in situ hybridization and array-based techniques. These changes are evident in
both molecular diagnostics and basic research. The combination of conventional and molecular
cytogenetics has given rise to high resolution techniques which have enabled the study of
fundamental questions regarding biological processes. It enables the study of inherited syndromes,
the mechanisms of tumorigenesis at molecular level, genome organization and the determination of
chromosome homologies between species. It allows the ease with which animals are selected in
breeding programs and other important aspects of animal production. The existence of enormous
resolution gap between traditional cytogenetic techniques and molecular biology techniques has now
been extensively reduced by molecular cytogenetics. In this paper we discussed a number of
techniques employed in cytogenetics and their methodologies, and recommend where future focus
should be for the benefits of animal production. The applications of these techniques have now
transcended the boundaries of low-resolution diagnostics of chromosomal aberrations and is now well
established in functional and comparative basic research.