Specific microbiome-dependent mechanisms underlie the energy harvest efficiency of ruminants
By Sheer Shabat, G. Sasson, Adi Doron-Faigenboim, Thomer Durman, Shamay Yaacoby, Margret E. Berg Miller, Bryan A. White, N. Shterzer, Itzhak Mizrahi. The ISME Journal, 2016
690 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Ruminants have the remarkable ability to convert human-indigestible plant biomass into human-digestible food products, due to a complex microbiome residing in the rumen compartment of their upper digestive tract. Here we report the discovery that rumen microbiome components are tightly linked to cows' ability to extract energy from their feed, termed feed efficiency. Feed efficiency was measured in 146 milking cows and analyses of the taxonomic composition, gene content, microbial activity and metabolomic composition was performed on the rumen microbiomes from the 78 most extreme animals. Lower richness of microbiome gene content and taxa was tightly linked to higher feed efficiency. Microbiome genes and species accurately predicted the animals' feed efficiency phenotype. Specific enrichment of microbes and metabolic pathways in each of these microbiome groups resulted in better energy and carbon channeling to the animal, while lowering methane emissions to the atmosphere. This ecological and mechanistic understanding of the rumen microbiome could lead to an increase in available food resources and environmentally friendly livestock agriculture.
Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, General Health Professions
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a7e505dccba8c90ccbd301121c8b378b9f8ccae2
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In Agronomy and Crop Science
Citations in the corpus
- Strategies to improve the efficiency of beef cattle production (2020, background): “Coprococcus catus was enriched in the rumen of efficient dairy cows that exhibited increased propionate and butyrate production, a shift in fermentation that may reduce the availability of metabolic hydrogen to reduce carbon dioxide to CH4 (Shabat et al. 2016).”