Host genetics influence the rumen microbiota and heritable rumen microbial features associate with feed efficiency in cattle
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The symbiotic rumen microbiota is essential for the digestion of plant fibers and contributes to the variation of production and health traits in ruminants. However, to date, the heritability of rumen microbial features and host genetic components associated with the rumen microbiota, as well as whether such genetic components are animal performance relevant, are largely unknown. In the present study, we assessed rumen microbiota from a cohort of 709 beef cattle and showed that multiple factors including breed, sex, and diet drove the variation of rumen microbiota among animals. The diversity indices, the relative abundance of ~ 34% of microbial taxa (59 out of 174), and the copy number of total bacteria had a heritability estimate ( h 2 ) ≥ 0.15, suggesting that they are heritable elements affected by host additive genetics. These moderately heritable rumen microbial features were also found to be associated with host feed efficiency traits and rumen metabolic measures (volatile fatty acids). Moreover, 19 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) located on 12 bovine chromosomes were found to be associated with 14 (12 of them had h 2 ≥ 0.15) rumen microbial taxa, and five of these SNPs were known quantitative trait loci for feed efficiency in cattle. These findings suggest that some rumen microbial features are heritable and could be influenced by host genetics, highlighting a potential to manipulate and obtain a desirable and efficient rumen microbiota using genetic selection and breeding. It could be a useful strategy to further improve feed efficiency and optimize rumen fermentation through targeting both cattle and their rumen microbiota.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it