A few blogs back I wrote about ongoing research that aims to reduce cattle methane emissions through selective breeding (https://southernplainsperspective.wordpress.com/2023/03/01/selective-livestock-breeding-and-climate-change-can-you-breed-the-burps-out-of-cows/). In that post, I said that sometimes you come across a headline that makes you stop and go, “Huh.”
Well, today I had another “Huh” moment.
It seems that researchers from Mississippi State University and the University of Puerto Rico have been studying cattle that have shorter, shinier hair coats resulting from genetics derived from the Senepol cattle breed. Senepol cattle were first developed on the Caribbean Island of St. Croix and bred to withstand the island’s tropical conditions. These cattle have shinier and shorter hair, that makes them more comfortable with high-heat environments and less susceptible to heat stress.
These researchers studied 84 Holsteins with this naturally occurring “slick” gene and found that the animals had lower body temperatures, lower respiration rates, and improved reproductive efficiency in tropical conditions compared to herd mates with traditional hair coats. With this information in hand, scientists from the U.S., New Zealand, and the U.K. successfully used CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology to successfully produce cattle with this “slick coat gene” first seen in the Senepol breed. Now semen from bulls that are homozygous for this gene through both genome editing and conventional breeding is currently available (there also is some information on work done by the University of Florida on this subject that you can read about here).
It also seems that a team of New Zealand researchers is exploring how gene editing can dilute the black hide color of Holstein cattle and make them less susceptible to heat stress. They conducted a study where they used gene editing to switch out the black gene in Holsteins with a semi-dominant color dilution phenotype from Highland and Galloway cattle. The calves that resulted from this work had spotted hide patterns typical of Holsteins, but instead of black, the darker areas of the calves’ hide were a silvery gray color that would attract less heat and suffer less heat stress. Developers of this process often stress that gene-editing technology simply takes traits that are already present in the animals’ genome and shares them with other animals to help accelerate the genetic progress of that trait in a herd population, although similar results could result from traditional selective breeding, albeit over a longer period of time.
The bottom line is that with the challenges we are continuing to see from extreme weather events (heat stress in livestock being among them), it’s good to see research advancing that can help give agriculture producers additional tools to help better prepare for whatever comes our way.
