Mip or SNP - What is the Difference?

In a nutshell, MiP is old technology and SNP is totally different, new technology that is not compatible with MiP.

MiP (Molecular Inversion Probes) tests 24 markers and was really only used for parentage verification. It was considered a huge breakthrough in accuracy at the end of the last century when it superseded blood typing that was the only method available prior to that. In comparison, SNP (Single Nucleotide Polymorphism) can test 10’s of thousands of markers, and so is not only a step up in accuracy, but it also provides access to many other DNA tests that may be able to benefit cattle breeding programs.

In people, SNP is used to predict drug sensitivities (of particular use when using chemotherapy to treat certain cancers) and predisposition to disease and health.

Unfortunately, MiP & SNP are totally different technologies and so are not compatible. If you have submitted DNA (tail hair or a semen straw)  in the past to a lab, this will have been placed in storage in liquid nitrogen after the initial test, and so an upgrade from MiP to SNP can usually be done, and most of the labs offer this at quite a low cost, to help people switch.

SNP is the more recent technology that tests many, many more markers and therefore is more accurate, but can also be used to look for other genes (eg colour genes, myoststin genes and a number of gene mutations). In time, more gene tests will become available that will allow prediction of good and bad traits within our cattle, from a very early age.

Of particular interest in breeding our cattle is that an old MiP profile is in no way transferable to a new SNP profile. This means that where calves are born to embryos created prior to SNP being available, they can only be parentage verified via MiP and this is not currently available in Australia (except via Zoetis, who sends it overseas). You can also get MiP profiles done at a couple of labs in the USA (we have checked and UC Davis are still comfortable to offer this old technology), but eventually MiP will become a thing of the past and these old embryos may not be able to be parentage verified, and therefore not able to be registered.

Having said that, experimentally, the technology currently exists to take a very small biopsy from an embryo and run a SNP profile, which still leaves the embryo viable. This opens up many doors (that we may or may not want opened) into accelerated breeding programs whereby you can implant the embryo with the characteristics that you want and flush the others down the toilet.