AGR

AgResearch Limited

New Zealand

AgResearch is a Crown Research Institute which is wholly owned by the New Zealand Government. Shareholders include the Minister of Science & Innovation and Minister of Finance. AgResearch has a Governance Board and corporate structure. Current Board members and Executives can be found at www.agresearch.co.nz/about-us.

Competence and main role(s) in the project

AgResearch has expertise in rumen microbial genomics and metagenomics, bioinformatics, and enteric methane emissions. Using the Hungate1000 collection, its collection of cultures, and strengths in microbial physiology. AgResearch will design, perform and interpret lab-based experiments to test genomic predictions and proposed microbial interactions using pure and defined mixed cultures. This will confirm microbial phenotypes and interactions by measuring activity (substrate and product transformations) and transcriptomics. These data will provide biological confirmation of hypotheses generated from sequence data. Furthermore, AgResearch has been using quantitative genomics approaches to predict livestock traits using host and microbial genotypes. Using livestock datasets for methane, feed efficiency and productivity in sheep, cattle and deer, AgResearch will determine parsimonious use of microbial sequence data for routine incorporation in large scale breeding programs. We will select well phenotyped animals and collect samples for metagenomic, transcriptomic and metabolomic assays.

Project staff

Graeme Attwood

Dr Attwood is a Principal Scientist in Rumen Microbiology at AgResearch who uses meta-omic approaches to investigate methanogenic Archaea to reduce ruminant methane and to characterise bacterial enzyme systems involved in forage breakdown. He is also a Principal Investigator in the NZ Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre.

Suzanne Rowe

Dr Rowe is a quantitative geneticist working on high throughput profiling of genomic phenotypes for prediction of individual variation for productivity, health, adaptation and environmental impact of livestock systems. She manages multiple projects on genomic prediction and mapping in cattle, sheep and deer with an emphasis on enteric methane.

Peter Janssen

Dr Janssen is a microbiologist and the Principal Investigator of the PGgRc-NZAGRC methane mitigation programme at AgResearch. He has established methods for investigating the microbial ecology of the rumen ecosystem, and for isolating novel rumen microbes. He co-led the Global Rumen Census project.

The HoloRuminant project has received funding from European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No 101000213. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and not the European Commission (EC). The EC is not liable for any use that may be made of them information contained herein.