IT’S 30 years since my grandmother’s horse, Dawn Run, won the Gold Cup two years after her Champion Hurdle success. Although I was very young during the Dawn Run era, I do remember being allowed out of biology class in school, in order to watch the race. It didn’t do me any harm, and I am very proud to carry on my family’s racing tradition now through my research into equine genetics with Plusvital (formerly Equinome).

As a young child, one of my earliest memories is of standing on a hillside watching my grandmother, Charmian Hill, galloping off into the distance in a point-to-point. I remember visiting her in hospital soon after – she must have come to grief in the race. It didn’t ever seem to stop her though and I remember her disgust when her licence wasn’t renewed at the age of 62!

Racing was a huge part of our lives, with my father both breeding and owning horses with great success. He bred the grandam of Johannes Vermeer, who was a winner at Royal Ascot in her time. Dad had a small handful of horses in training with Jim Bolger and the late Paddy Mullins and had a few Cheltenham runners. I used to ride them when they were at home on their summer break.

I learned to ride on ponies inherited from Henry de Bromhead and Richard Hughes; I like to think some of their horsemanship skills were passed on through those ponies.

Despite my upbringing, it was really only when I was in university that I was bitten properly by the racing bug. While studying Natural Sciences in Trinity College, I spent the summer of first year riding out for John Oxx on the Curragh. I rode out three lots every morning and loved it. I knew at that point that horses would always be a part of my life. I had yet to discover they would end up taking over my life.

It was during my degree course that I began studying genetics and started to consider if it could be applied to thoroughbreds in some way. My father, a successful breeder, recognised that there was a niche there, as up to that point breeders only had pedigrees to go by and there was very little knowledge of modern genetic techniques. That was around the time that the human genome was being sequenced for the first time, so it was a hotly discussed topic.

At the time there was no such thing as equine genetics as we know it now, so for my PhD I studied human genetics and afterwards I spent some time in Kenya working on the genetics of sleeping sickness resistance in African cattle.

AWARD

Having graduated from Trinity, I moved to UCD, where in 2004 I received a President of Ireland Young Researcher award from Science Foundation Ireland, to start the world’s first academic research programme investigating performance genetics in thoroughbred racehorses. As part of my initial investigations I contacted a number of breeders and trainers asking for DNA samples from their horses for research.

Most of them were very accommodating. However, Jim Bolger went a step further. He was the only one who phoned up the following year, asking how my research was progressing and offering further samples from his next set of yearlings. It was clear that Jim had a real interest in the programme, so we decided to collaborate on the research and installed a treadmill at his yard, established the use of GPS/HR technology and for many of our academic studies now use Bolger’s horses as our study subjects.

Over time the research proved very successful and when it became evident that a commercial opportunity was presenting itself, Jim expressed an interest in becoming involved and we teamed up to co-found the company, Equinome. Jim has integrated the genetics into his breeding programme over the last eight years and we firmly believe it has contributed in part to the success he has enjoyed over the past decade or so. He uses genetic information now on a daily basis and all the staff at Coolcullen know the speed gene type of every horse in the yard.

We are now embarking on a new and exciting period for the company, having recently merged with the Irish equine nutrition company Plusvital. Equinome proved to be a huge success over the last six years and we believed the next logical step was to expand the business, to bring additional scientific products and services to the industry. DNA contributes the raw material for a horse’s genetic potential, but management plays an equal if not greater part in success.

We want to use more evidence-based science to give owners, breeders and trainers as much knowledge as possible when they are making breeding, selection or training decisions.

The nutritional management of the horse is critical to get right, and we are now investigating if there are genetic links to the nutritional requirements of the athletic horse. The rate of advances in scientific technologies and knowhow means that we will need to continue to explore new ways to progress the status quo to remain competitive.

While I always hoped that horses would be part of my life, I didn’t realise they would become my whole life. Everyone knows that there is no work/life balance with horses; now my non-work time is taken up shuttling my two children to various pony events and trying to catch up with them on my retired chaser.

Emmeline Hill was in conversation with John O’Riordan