this is a formidable beast
this is a noroc the ancestor of modern
cattle and I’ve stood beside this
skeleton in a museum in Denmark and this
animal towers way above me yet our
ancestors managed to domesticate these
Oryx at obviously considerable risk to
themselves the question is why did they
take such a risk the answer is they
observed that cattle have this
incredible ability to convert grass
which of course we can eat to highly
nutritious milk and meat and with a bit
of processing foods that we really love
to eat like cheese and yogurts
and these are become very key parts of
the diet in some countries around the
world recently however demand for these
highly nutritious foods has been
increasing incredibly rapidly way more
rapidly than we’ve ever seen in the past
and this is because our population is
growing rapidly but also with the rising
middle class in Asia demand is just
really really going very fast so the
challenge for us is how do we meet this
rising demand while also reducing the
environmental footprint that cattle have
on our planet traditional breeding just
isn’t going to cut it here it served us
very well in the past but it’s not going
to allow us to meet this demand we do
have a new technology however and that
new technology is genomics so genomics
let’s start with the genome to allow you
to visualize a cattle genome let’s start
with a few tail hairs and if you take
those tail hairs from a cow
you’ll see the small follicles on the
end of those tail hairs if you go into
those follicles and you take out a
single cell and you take out the DNA
from that single cell what you end up
with is a tiny thin white string that is
a meter long and that thin white string
consists of three billion AC T’s and G’s
just as it does for humans but somewhere
embedded in that genome those AC T’s and
G’s are the genes that affect milk
production beef production and all the
other traits we can look at so if you
compare the genome of two cattle if you
start reading off their genomes you’ll
see the vast majority of the genome is
actually the same that’s until you come
to what we call a single nucleotide
polymorphism or a snip and this is just
a difference in the genome code so one
cow might carry a G and another might
carry a C and through the work we’ve
done we know that there are about 80
million of these differences if you
start reading off the sequences of large
groups of cattle another part of the
genome revolution though is being able
to get this information really cheaply
and easily and that’s where these snip
chips come in so these are small glass
slides that will assay the genome of
your cattle at 50 thousand points so
they don’t read off the entire genome
but they allow you to take a snapshot of
the genome at 50,000 points along that
genome so if you take your DNA from your
cow you run it across one of these glass
slides what you get back is 50,000 AC
T’s and G’s the snapshots through the
genome that’s a lot of information but
how are we going to use it
to increase milk and meat production to
meet this rapidly growing demand so
that’s where this technology of genomic
selection comes in so the way genomic
selection works is you need a very large
population of say cattle measured for
the trait you’re interested in like
milk production so you have them
measured for milk production you also
have them genotype for these 50,000
snapshots through the genome using these
small glass slides then what you can do
at each of those snapshots you can ask
is there a difference in milk production
between those cows that carry the AE
versus the T for example and if you do
find a difference between the group of
cows that carry the a and the group of
cows that carry the T what you have is
evidence that that mutation that
snapshot is tracking a gene that affects
milk production one of the things we’ve
realized after a great amount of work is
there’s not just one gene affecting
traits like this affecting milk
production or beef production in fact
there’s thousands across the genome so
we actually need these 50,000 snapshots
through the genome to track all these
different genes affecting milk and meat
production but once we’ve worked out the
effect of these snapshots through the
genome really what genes are they
tracking then we’re really in business
because it means we can go into any
animal in the population say it’s a bull
calf that’s just been born take a DNA
sample and predict the value of his
genetics for say milk production and
then if he carries really good genetics
for milk production we can start
breeding from him as early as possible
and if you do this
and dairy industries around the world
are very actively doing this at the
moment it will increase the rate of gain
you have in milk production so to date
around the world about 3 million cattle
have had their DNA sampled and run
across these snip chips for the purposes
of working out which ones are the best
ones to breed from which ones carry the
best genetics and the technology has
recently been demonstrated to double the
rate of gain double the rate of increase
in milk and beef production as well and
it’s now being translated into crops
like wheat and corn another good part
about the technology is it’s helping us
balance up selection for just production
so just milk and meat production with
other traits that are really important
for example how healthy the animals are
and this is disease resistance whether
they lead long productive lives or not
we can find the genetics using these
snapshots through the genome that lead
to cows having long productive lives and
farmers are using this technology to
select cows like that that will have
healthy productive lives so it’s really
balancing up selection for straight
production with healthiness productive
life and so on now another key part of
the balance is the environmental impact
that cattle production is going to have
we can reduce the environmental impact
by improving feed conversion efficiency
for example the amount of milk and beef
produced for one kilogram of feed going
into the animal but cattle also produce
methane and the reason is linked to how
they do this wonderful trick of turning
grass into
high-value meat and milk so cattle have
this massive organ called a rumen and
what a rumen is is really a giant
fermentation chamber filled with umpteen
millions of bacteria and other organisms
and this rumen allows the animal to
ferment the grass into high-value
nutrients for the animal so the grass
goes in into the room and gets fermented
provides nutrients to the cow and you
can see the size of the room and
relative to the animal it really is a
very large organ as a result of this
fermentation methane is produced and
burped up by the cow now with modern
sequencing technologies what we can do
for the first time is start to profile
the organisms that are in the rumen and
we can start to ask the question if we
have a group of cows in the same paddock
on the same pasture is there differences
in their microorganism profile are they
carrying different bugs in their room
and we can also measure the amount of
methane being produced by these animals
so we can ask the further question can
we make a link between variation in the
room and microorganism profile and the
amount of methane they’re producing now
we’ve been conducting this type of
research for the past five years or so
and we’ve demonstrated there really is a
link between differences in the room and
microorganism profile that you get from
DNA sequencing and the amount of methane
they produce so we can recognize a rumen
that is going to produce less methane
the next trick will be to take those
room and organisms and perhaps inoculate
all the cows in the herd so they all
produce less methane but that’s
the research so the impact that this is
going to have genomic selection this
technology of using snapshots through
the genome to track the genes affecting
milk and meat production it’s already
increasing the rate of gain in milk and
beef production and we’re seeing that
improve by 2% now per year that may not
sound like a great deal until you
realize these gains are cumulative so
this year you make 2 percent extra gains
the next year 4 percent next year 6
percent and so on so after a decade you
have quite substantial gains the
technology is also allowing us to get a
better balance in our selection so not
just go hard for production but balance
that with disease resistance our
fertility how long the cow stays in the
herd and general healthiness of the
animals
and finally it’s leading to decrease
methane emissions so genomic selection
for feed efficiency will do that reduce
the amount of feed required to produce a
liter of milk or a kilogram of beef and
this new technology of profiling the
rumen may lead to even further
reductions so we’re looking at a
decrease in emissions of perhaps 15
percent per decade which is quite
substantial thank you
[Music]
you
this is a noroc the ancestor of modern
cattle and I’ve stood beside this
skeleton in a museum in Denmark and this
animal towers way above me yet our
ancestors managed to domesticate these
Oryx at obviously considerable risk to
themselves the question is why did they
take such a risk the answer is they
observed that cattle have this
incredible ability to convert grass
which of course we can eat to highly
nutritious milk and meat and with a bit
of processing foods that we really love
to eat like cheese and yogurts
and these are become very key parts of
the diet in some countries around the
world recently however demand for these
highly nutritious foods has been
increasing incredibly rapidly way more
rapidly than we’ve ever seen in the past
and this is because our population is
growing rapidly but also with the rising
middle class in Asia demand is just
really really going very fast so the
challenge for us is how do we meet this
rising demand while also reducing the
environmental footprint that cattle have
on our planet traditional breeding just
isn’t going to cut it here it served us
very well in the past but it’s not going
to allow us to meet this demand we do
have a new technology however and that
new technology is genomics so genomics
let’s start with the genome to allow you
to visualize a cattle genome let’s start
with a few tail hairs and if you take
those tail hairs from a cow
you’ll see the small follicles on the
end of those tail hairs if you go into
those follicles and you take out a
single cell and you take out the DNA
from that single cell what you end up
with is a tiny thin white string that is
a meter long and that thin white string
consists of three billion AC T’s and G’s
just as it does for humans but somewhere
embedded in that genome those AC T’s and
G’s are the genes that affect milk
production beef production and all the
other traits we can look at so if you
compare the genome of two cattle if you
start reading off their genomes you’ll
see the vast majority of the genome is
actually the same that’s until you come
to what we call a single nucleotide
polymorphism or a snip and this is just
a difference in the genome code so one
cow might carry a G and another might
carry a C and through the work we’ve
done we know that there are about 80
million of these differences if you
start reading off the sequences of large
groups of cattle another part of the
genome revolution though is being able
to get this information really cheaply
and easily and that’s where these snip
chips come in so these are small glass
slides that will assay the genome of
your cattle at 50 thousand points so
they don’t read off the entire genome
but they allow you to take a snapshot of
the genome at 50,000 points along that
genome so if you take your DNA from your
cow you run it across one of these glass
slides what you get back is 50,000 AC
T’s and G’s the snapshots through the
genome that’s a lot of information but
how are we going to use it
to increase milk and meat production to
meet this rapidly growing demand so
that’s where this technology of genomic
selection comes in so the way genomic
selection works is you need a very large
population of say cattle measured for
the trait you’re interested in like
milk production so you have them
measured for milk production you also
have them genotype for these 50,000
snapshots through the genome using these
small glass slides then what you can do
at each of those snapshots you can ask
is there a difference in milk production
between those cows that carry the AE
versus the T for example and if you do
find a difference between the group of
cows that carry the a and the group of
cows that carry the T what you have is
evidence that that mutation that
snapshot is tracking a gene that affects
milk production one of the things we’ve
realized after a great amount of work is
there’s not just one gene affecting
traits like this affecting milk
production or beef production in fact
there’s thousands across the genome so
we actually need these 50,000 snapshots
through the genome to track all these
different genes affecting milk and meat
production but once we’ve worked out the
effect of these snapshots through the
genome really what genes are they
tracking then we’re really in business
because it means we can go into any
animal in the population say it’s a bull
calf that’s just been born take a DNA
sample and predict the value of his
genetics for say milk production and
then if he carries really good genetics
for milk production we can start
breeding from him as early as possible
and if you do this
and dairy industries around the world
are very actively doing this at the
moment it will increase the rate of gain
you have in milk production so to date
around the world about 3 million cattle
have had their DNA sampled and run
across these snip chips for the purposes
of working out which ones are the best
ones to breed from which ones carry the
best genetics and the technology has
recently been demonstrated to double the
rate of gain double the rate of increase
in milk and beef production as well and
it’s now being translated into crops
like wheat and corn another good part
about the technology is it’s helping us
balance up selection for just production
so just milk and meat production with
other traits that are really important
for example how healthy the animals are
and this is disease resistance whether
they lead long productive lives or not
we can find the genetics using these
snapshots through the genome that lead
to cows having long productive lives and
farmers are using this technology to
select cows like that that will have
healthy productive lives so it’s really
balancing up selection for straight
production with healthiness productive
life and so on now another key part of
the balance is the environmental impact
that cattle production is going to have
we can reduce the environmental impact
by improving feed conversion efficiency
for example the amount of milk and beef
produced for one kilogram of feed going
into the animal but cattle also produce
methane and the reason is linked to how
they do this wonderful trick of turning
grass into
high-value meat and milk so cattle have
this massive organ called a rumen and
what a rumen is is really a giant
fermentation chamber filled with umpteen
millions of bacteria and other organisms
and this rumen allows the animal to
ferment the grass into high-value
nutrients for the animal so the grass
goes in into the room and gets fermented
provides nutrients to the cow and you
can see the size of the room and
relative to the animal it really is a
very large organ as a result of this
fermentation methane is produced and
burped up by the cow now with modern
sequencing technologies what we can do
for the first time is start to profile
the organisms that are in the rumen and
we can start to ask the question if we
have a group of cows in the same paddock
on the same pasture is there differences
in their microorganism profile are they
carrying different bugs in their room
and we can also measure the amount of
methane being produced by these animals
so we can ask the further question can
we make a link between variation in the
room and microorganism profile and the
amount of methane they’re producing now
we’ve been conducting this type of
research for the past five years or so
and we’ve demonstrated there really is a
link between differences in the room and
microorganism profile that you get from
DNA sequencing and the amount of methane
they produce so we can recognize a rumen
that is going to produce less methane
the next trick will be to take those
room and organisms and perhaps inoculate
all the cows in the herd so they all
produce less methane but that’s
the research so the impact that this is
going to have genomic selection this
technology of using snapshots through
the genome to track the genes affecting
milk and meat production it’s already
increasing the rate of gain in milk and
beef production and we’re seeing that
improve by 2% now per year that may not
sound like a great deal until you
realize these gains are cumulative so
this year you make 2 percent extra gains
the next year 4 percent next year 6
percent and so on so after a decade you
have quite substantial gains the
technology is also allowing us to get a
better balance in our selection so not
just go hard for production but balance
that with disease resistance our
fertility how long the cow stays in the
herd and general healthiness of the
animals
and finally it’s leading to decrease
methane emissions so genomic selection
for feed efficiency will do that reduce
the amount of feed required to produce a
liter of milk or a kilogram of beef and
this new technology of profiling the
rumen may lead to even further
reductions so we’re looking at a
decrease in emissions of perhaps 15
percent per decade which is quite
substantial thank you
[Music]
you
Please follow and like us: