Abstract
The livestock performance in tropical regions has been limited by environmental conditions that causes heat stress and favors the development of parasites and diseases, impairing animal health. Heat stress disturbs animal homeostasis and affects animal production and fertility, with negative impacts on meat and milk quality. Flies and ticks proliferate easily under hot-humid weather, which makes difficult the control of their population, resulting in an increased parasitism. Tropical pastures usually have high dry matter production, but it is challenging to keep high production and quality under different environmental conditions throughout the year, constraining animal performance. Several strategies have been adopted in an attempt to overcome such hurdles in the tropical regions, but definitive solutions are yet to be implemented. In the last 20 years, biotechnologies, such as in vitro embryo production and genomic selection, have played an important role on cattle production in tropical countries. Genome editing (GnEd) is the novel tool in the toolbox for cattle production. GnEd with genomic selection offers the opportunity to boost the genetic gain in breeding programs of tropical cattle in fewer generations. It can be applied for disease resistance, to control parasite population, and to improve pasture quality and tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses, favoring animal health and nutrition. Moreover, there is a perspective for the use of GnEd to control cattle methane emission by editing genes of methanogens present in the rumen. Although GnEd can already be applied to improve some traits, studies are still required for the identification of candidate genes in animals, tropical pastures, parasites, and microorganisms that can be targeted by gene editing in order to offer a robust contribution to the improvement of cattle production in the hot regions. Some examples of the use of GnEd are presented in this review, focusing on new perspectives of using GnEd to increase cattle production under the challenges of the tropical environments.
Highlights
The world population is projected to reach 9.7 billion people in 2050, with most of the population growth estimated for countries located in tropical or subtropical regions, as Africa and Asia (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2019)
Even though preliminary studies and a fine-mapping analysis are still required, such data suggest that causal mutations associated with the regulation of body temperature can be found in other candidate genes and, once the function is well-established, they can be potentially targeted by Genome editing (GnEd)
Increase the milk production in B. taurus indicus cattle Control of screwworm infestations Increase the tolerance to tick infestations in B. taurus taurus cattle Decrease the cattle methane emission produced by methanogenic archaea as Methanobrevibacter gottschalkii and Mbb. ruminantium, among others (Patra et al 2017)
Summary
Tropical pastures can be edited to increase drought tolerance and digestibility to provide good quality forages to feed animals along the year. Climate change may contribute to further accentuate the effect of temperature on reducing the productivity of cattle herds (Nardone et al 2010; Thornton et al 2009), especially in tropical regions already affected by excessive heat and that hold a large bovine population.
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