ID B1 Relatie microbioom en genetica (BO-43.10-002-003, BO-43-105-011, BO-53-003-028)

The cow’s rumen microbiome has an impact on its methane emission. Furthermore, individual variation in microbiome exist and is partially heritable, making the microbiome an interesting trait when breeding cattle with lower methane emissions. Current commercial breeding schemes of dairy cattle do not take the rumen microbiome into account. This is partially because, traditional rumen sampling is unfit for use in large-scales due to its required equipment, cost, time and invasive nature. To implement the fast and effective breeding of dairy cattle with low methane emissions on a large-scale, we thereby strive to create a minimalistic microbiome sampling and analysis (phenotyping) methodology that is suitable for dairy cows. We will use a dataset of rumen microbiota collected previously in the 2020-Klimaatenvelope, to find out which microbial genes are abundant, heritable and genetically correlated with methane and to develop statistical models for breeding value estimation including microbiome data. In addition, we will investigate whether the microbiome from buccal swaps is representative of the microbiome of rumen samples, as buccal swaps are less invasive and easier to implement as a large-scale phenotyping method for the microbiome.