April 2026 talk of the monthly meeting of the #animal-genomics special interest group.

We are delighted to welcome David MacHugh (UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science, University College Dublin, Ireland). David MacHugh grew up in Dun Laoghaire and attended Newpark Comprehensive School in Blackrock. David obtained a BA (Mod) degree in Genetics from Trinity College Dublin and, in 1990, undertook PhD research in animal genomics at TCD, which he completed in 1995. A Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship in Bioarchaeology funded his postdoctoral work on livestock paleogenomics. In 1999, he took up a Lectureship in University College Dublin and was appointed Associate Professor in Genomics in 2009 and Full Professor of Functional Genomics in 2019. Between 2018 and 2021, he was Vice Principal for Research, Innovation, and Impact at the UCD College of Health and Agricultural Sciences. He is also a Conway Investigator, a member of the UCD One Health Centre, co-founder and Scientific Advisor to Plusvital/Zinto Ltd., and was a co-founder and member of the Scientific Advisory Board of IdentiGEN Ltd., which is now part of MSD Animal Health. David’s research programme focuses on the functional genomics of host-pathogen interactions in Mycobacterium bovis infection and the development of novel disease biomarkers for bovine tuberculosis. Other research activities include livestock production genomics; population genomics of extinct and modern livestock populations; and, in collaboration with Professor Emmeline Hill, genomics of health and performance traits in Thoroughbred horses. He has published more than 170 peer-reviewed scientific publications, and a full research profile is available at: people.ucd.ie/david.machugh.

Using genomics to understand bovine tuberculosis disease caused by infection with Mycobacterium bovis

Bovine tuberculosis (TB) is a chronic infectious disease caused by the intracellular pathogen Mycobacterium bovis, which is responsible for significant economic losses in the livestock industry worldwide and can also cause TB disease in a range of other mammals, including humans. Over the last two decades, we have used increasingly powerful genomic approaches to investigate host-pathogen interactions in bovine tuberculosis with the dual aims of developing biomarkers of M. bovis infection and dissecting the genetic architecture of resilience traits in bovine TB disease. Here, I describe this work and outline how a One Health strategy that encompasses comparative analyses of human TB, caused by infection with the closely related pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis, can also provide new scientific knowledge to tackle TB disease in human and animal populations.