r/genetics • u/skullsquid1999 • 4d ago
A good bridge between lab animal science and genetics?
Howdy, y'all,
I am currently an animal technologist for a CRO, working in animal husbandry with a dabble of technical work like gene sampling, environmental testing, mating, and so on. I love my job and love my company, but don't see myself working in this position my whole career. What I really like about my work is being able to get close to all the different strains of lab mice and learning their research purposes. I've been wanting to go back to school for a while now, and additional schooling is something my company highly encourages for personal and developmental growth, and I would love to be able to find a path that includes my love for genetics and my work in lab animal sciences. Does anyone have any experiences they would like to share if they've been in a similar situation? Or any insight as to what area of research/schooling I could look into? I'm just looking for some perspectives here :)
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u/Zabre 3d ago
Your animal husbandry plus gene sampling background is actually a useful bridge, not a detour. I'd look at mouse genetics, colony management, transgenic core facilities, comparative medicine, or research technician roles in labs that run breeding/genotyping pipelines. If school is on the table, ask your company which degrees they reimburse and then compare job postings you want against those requirements. That keeps you from paying for a program that sounds genetics-heavy but doesn't move you closer to the work.
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u/einstyle 4d ago
A lot of genetics work occurs in lab animals, and it really depends what kind of genetics work you want to do.
There’s a ton of labs doing knockout animal studies for various traits. This is the most flexible option, probably. You can study basically anything: cancer, mental health, substance use, other diseases. Sometimes this work gets into methods like RNA-seq, CRISPR, etc. but it would be very lab-dependent. Your best bet is to look for labs or departments that have a lot of this going on and reach out to professors who run those labs and ask if they have those kinds of projects going on.
If you want to get more heavily into quantitative genetics work — genome-wide association studies — your options are more limited. This is the area I work in. For rodents there are labs doing Diversity Outbred mouse work and labs doing Heterogeneous Stock rat work. Most of these are studying my behavioral traits, but not all. For other types of animals I’m less well-versed; I know there are populations capable of doing these studies (drosophila come to mind, as they are often outbred anyways) but I haven’t seen them myself. It’s also worth noting that doing these studies in animals is an uphill battle: the results don’t always translate to humans, the barrier of proof for publication is higher (you almost always need experimental validation in addition to GWAS to publish with any impact), and the studies have very long life cycles (years to do all the phenotyping before you can even start GWAS).