An international team of scientists announced Thursday that they’ve sequenced the complete cow genome, a landmark discovery that someday lead to increased milk production and improved meat quality.

The cow is the first livestock mammal to have its genetic blueprint sequenced and analyzed. The research was unveiled Thursday in the journal Science.

“The cattle industry is extremely important for U.S. agriculture with more than 94 million cattle in the United States valued at $49 billion,” said U.S Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “Understanding the cattle genome and having the sequence will allow researchers to understand the genetic basis for disease in domestic cattle and could result in healthier production of meat and milk while reducing producers’ dependence on antibiotics.”

Scientists from both the University of Missouri and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign played significant roles in the research, which operated under the auspices of Bovine Genome Sequencing Project, a six year, multinational scientific collaboration.

Read the Post-Dispatch tomorrow to learn more about the local contributions to this major discovery