What is it about?
The ruminant livestock sector plays a key role for the sustaining of humans by providing high-quality protein food for from human inedible resource. The success of ruminant animals is linked to their capability to harvest nutrients from plant carbohydrates (e.g. cellulose). The digestion of these carbohydrates is performed by a galaxy of microbes that inhabits the rumen. This microbial community is called the rumen microbiota. In this work, we develop a mathematical model of the rumen microbiota fermentation to enhance understanding of the action of these microbes and its implications on the animal. Our model was implemented in Matlab and is freely available for academic purposes.
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Why is it important?
A mathematical model of rumen fermentation is important to predict the responses of the animal to feeding practices. A model can also be useful to design optimal nutritional strategies that maximize animal productivity and minimize the production of methane, which is a greenhouse gas that contributes to the environmental footprint of the livestock sector.
Perspectives
Our work was focused on in vitro fermentation. We will extend our model to account for physiological animal factors. We expect the resulting model will be an useful tool for devising sustainable nutritional strategies for ruminants.
Rafael Muñoz-Tamayo
Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Mechanistic modelling of in vitro fermentation and methane production by rumen microbiota, Animal Feed Science and Technology, October 2016, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.anifeedsci.2016.07.005.
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