BGU's Mizrahi Group has successfully manipulated a cow’s microbiome for the first time.
BGU's Mizrahi Group has successfully manipulated a cow’s microbiome for the first time. By learning to control the microbiome, scientists can prevent cows from emitting methane, one of the most serious greenhouse gases.
Prof. Itzhak Mizrahi’s findings were published late last month in Nature Communications.
The microbiome is an underexplored area scientifically, yet it exerts great control over many aspects of animal and human physical systems. Microbes begin to be introduced at birth and produce a unique microbiome which then evolves over time.
Mizrahi and his group have been running a three-year experiment with a group of 50 cows. The cows were divided into two groups. One group gave birth naturally, and the other gave birth through cesarean section. That difference was enough to change the development and composition of the microbiome of the cows from each group. This finding essentially enabled the development of an algorithm to predict the microbiome development: an algorithm that will predict how the microbiomes evolve over time based on its present composition together with Prof. Eran Halperin’s group at UCLA.
Read more at American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Photo Credit: CallyL via Pixabay
