I don't know diddley squat about cows aside from the milk and steak parts but I do know they burp and fart a lot and that makes the green people extremely angry. But I came across this article where scientists at some schools not named Texas A&M are working with probiotics to change all of that. I linked what should be a free copy of the entire article and pasted a few paragraphs to make it shorter, those folks at WaPo tend to write forever.
There are approximately 1.5 billion cows on the planet. Their digestive systems are nothing short of miraculous — they can survive on grass, corn and alfalfa but also the battered byproducts of human crops: almond hulls, corn husks, even sawdust. The cows have help. A rich microbiome in the largest chamber of their stomach, known as the rumen, dismantles these foodstuffs and transforms them into usable energy.
“It’s incredible,” said Spencer Diamond, head of microbiome modeling at the genomics institute. “It works amazingly and never fails.”
But the rumen has a dark side. The porous, fleshy chamber hosts single-celled organisms called archaea, which break down hydrogen and carbon dioxide, producing methane. Unable to process the gas, cows burp it up. The average cow produces around 220 pounds of methane per year, or around half the emissions of an average car; cows are currently responsible for around 4 percent of global warming, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Enter a team of gene editors. Scientists envision a kind of probiotic pill, given to the cow at birth, that can transform its microbiome permanently. Using gene editing tools, researchers have already bred cattle without horns, or with special slick coats that help them stay cool amid rising temperatures. The current project doesn’t target only a particular cow species — it takes aim at the microbiome itself, offering a solution that could apply to all of them.
When cows eat, they chew their feed, mixing it with saliva, then swallow. (A cow can produce a whopping 40 gallons of saliva per day, depending on its diet.) Some of that food is broken down further through “chewing the cud,” or ruminating — in which the cow regurgitates some of its feed, gnashes it down further, then swallows it again.
There is still a long way to go. While scientists have proved that they can gene-edit microbes, researchers have so far only shown that they can edit a small fraction of the microbes in the cow gut — or the human gut, for that matter. Institute researchers are developing microbial gene-editing tools, even as they are mapping the species of the microbiome. They are building the plane while flying it.
The teams have received enough funding for seven years of research. The project started last year, and they hope to have a trial treatment ready for testing in cows in the next two years.
There are approximately 1.5 billion cows on the planet. Their digestive systems are nothing short of miraculous — they can survive on grass, corn and alfalfa but also the battered byproducts of human crops: almond hulls, corn husks, even sawdust. The cows have help. A rich microbiome in the largest chamber of their stomach, known as the rumen, dismantles these foodstuffs and transforms them into usable energy.
“It’s incredible,” said Spencer Diamond, head of microbiome modeling at the genomics institute. “It works amazingly and never fails.”
But the rumen has a dark side. The porous, fleshy chamber hosts single-celled organisms called archaea, which break down hydrogen and carbon dioxide, producing methane. Unable to process the gas, cows burp it up. The average cow produces around 220 pounds of methane per year, or around half the emissions of an average car; cows are currently responsible for around 4 percent of global warming, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Enter a team of gene editors. Scientists envision a kind of probiotic pill, given to the cow at birth, that can transform its microbiome permanently. Using gene editing tools, researchers have already bred cattle without horns, or with special slick coats that help them stay cool amid rising temperatures. The current project doesn’t target only a particular cow species — it takes aim at the microbiome itself, offering a solution that could apply to all of them.
When cows eat, they chew their feed, mixing it with saliva, then swallow. (A cow can produce a whopping 40 gallons of saliva per day, depending on its diet.) Some of that food is broken down further through “chewing the cud,” or ruminating — in which the cow regurgitates some of its feed, gnashes it down further, then swallows it again.
There is still a long way to go. While scientists have proved that they can gene-edit microbes, researchers have so far only shown that they can edit a small fraction of the microbes in the cow gut — or the human gut, for that matter. Institute researchers are developing microbial gene-editing tools, even as they are mapping the species of the microbiome. They are building the plane while flying it.
The teams have received enough funding for seven years of research. The project started last year, and they hope to have a trial treatment ready for testing in cows in the next two years.
