Can ruminal microbial information help improve selection for low-methane emitting dairy cows?

Greenhouse gas emissions from livestock have been at the centre of a worldwide discussion. To achieve tangible results in mitigation strategies, all tools in the available toolset need to be used. One tool is the rumen microbiome, which are partly under the host genetics' control, and could help explain variation in methane emissions from ruminants. Data on methane emissions and rumen fluid samples were collected from 179 dairy cows from Dutch commercial herds. Genotypes from 70 cows were used to estimate heritability for methane intensity. Our goal was to assess the power of our pipeline, for subsequent application to a bigger dataset, by evaluating the value of adding microbial information to the analysis. Microbial estimates were highly confounded with the effect of farm. Our preliminary results show that our workflow is appropriate and that we will be able to estimate microbiability and heritability when our full dataset becomes available.