Nanopore for Environmentally Friendly Cows

Elizabeth Ross from the University of Queensland in Australia presented at the Nanopore Community Meeting in Singapore on “Revolutionizing agriculture: harnessing the power of nanopore sequencing in genomics.” They work in the Center for Animal Science focusing on improving production. Ross spoke about the growing population and limited resources. Ross explained that genomic breeding is a way to determine useful traits. Ross and team are working on decentralizing genomic information and “saving the world one cow at a time” with methane considerations. Ross’ student extracted DNA from cows on site/farm, prepared rapid sequencing libraries, and sequenced! They compared different coverage with Nanopore and SNP arrays using breeding values. SNP array are the industry standard. They obtained excellent correlation between breeding values obtained by SNP array and Nanopore sequencing. Furthermore, the decisions producers made with these data are very similar whether Nanopore sequencing or SNPs were used. Ross also focused on rumen microbes to learn about methane producers. Before they used Illumina sequencing and now they wanted to implement Nanopore. Their results suggest that they can breed more environmentally friendly cows using Nanopore sequencing for genotyping and analyzing microbiomes!

group of black and white cows near river
How can on-site Nanopore sequencing help genotype and learn about the microbiomes of cows for breeding? Photo by Matthias Zomer on Pexels.com