Can We Fight Climate Change By Bioengineering a Better Cow?

One of Slashdot's most-visited stories of all time was the 2016 story asking: Can Cow Backpacks Reduce Global Methane Emissions?"Enteric fermentation," or livestock's digestive process, accounts for 22 percent of all U.S. methane emissions, and the manure they produce makes up eight percent more, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency... Methane, like carbon, is a greenhouse gas, but methane's global warming impact per molecule is 25 times greater than carbon's, according to the EPA. Cow methane still "heats the Earth more than every flight across the world combined," the Washington Post added today, reporting on a new $30 million genetic engineering experiment undertaken by the Innovative Genomics Institute and the University of California at Davis. Its mission: to transform a cow's gut so it no longer releases methane.Using tools that snip and transfer DNA, researchers plan to genetically engineer microbes in the cow stomach to eliminate those emissions. If they succeed, they could wipe out the world's largest human-made source of methane and help change the trajectory of planetary warming... The average cow produces around 220 pounds of methane per year, or around half the emissions of an average car; cows are currently responsible for around 4 percent of global warming, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization... Scientists envision a kind of probiotic pill, given to the cow at birth, that can transform its microbiome permanently... The current project doesn't target only a particular cow species - it takes aim at the microbiome itself, offering a solution that could apply to all of them. Brad Ringeisen, executive director at the genomics institute, cut his teeth running biotechnology at the U.S. defense research agency DARPA, which helped pioneer transformative innovations including the internet, miniaturized GPS, stealth aircraft and the computer mouse. "I'm taking the DARPA mentality here," he said. "Let's solve it for all cows, not just a fraction of the cows." ...] "There's no reason a cow has to produce methane," Ringeisen said. So what if scientists could just ... turn it off? "I personally think this is the one that can make the biggest impact in the world," Ringeisen said. "Say you could wave a magic wand and eliminate all those emissions." The article says that currently the scientists are feeding red-seaweed oil to a cow to measure the changes, to prepare for their final goal: "replicate those changes with gene editing." (They're using machine learning to reassemble the hundreds of pieces of each miccroorganism's DNA, so they can understand which changes they need to make with their early-intervention probiotic.)Such a probiotic could also improve a farm's productivity. Cows can lose up to 12 percent of their energy through burping up methane; other ruminants, like sheep and goats, also lose energy in this way. "If there is a way to redirect that hydrogen and convert it into milk, meat, wool - it would be much more accepted by farmers," said Ermias Kebreab [a professor of animal science at UC-Davis]. Early treatments will be tested on the cows at Davis, with researchers tracking their burps to evaluate the drop-off in methane emissions. There is still a long way to go. While scientists have proved that they can gene-edit microbes, researchers have so far only shown that they can edit a small fraction of the microbes in the cow gut - or the human gut, for that matter. Institute researchers are developing microbial gene-editing tools, even as they are mapping the species of the microbiome. They are building the plane while flying it. The teams have received enough funding for seven years of research. The project started last year, and they hope to have a trial treatment ready for testing in cows in the next two years.

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