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Post-harvest changes in ingested forage

Reference	BBS/E/W/10964A01C
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor Alison Kingston-Smith
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors	Dr Gordon Allison, Professor Gareth Griffith, Dr Russell Morphew, Professor Luis Mur, Professor Nigel Scollan
Institution	Aberystwyth University
Department	IBERS
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	1,318,879
Status	Completed
Type	Institute Project
Start date	01/04/2012
End date	31/03/2017
Duration	59 months

Abstract

This sub-programme investigates how forage chemistry and post-harvest changes of fresh forage affect ruminal fermentation, and the extent of genetic control. Transcriptomic and proteomic approaches together with bio-imaging and unbiased and targeted metabolite analyses of established in vitro and in sacco experimentation will be used to identify the key plant-based traits that can influence the rumen systems model. Candidate post-harvest responses for targetted analysis include control of plant-mediated proteolysis during rumen-induced plant cell death, microbial molecular pattern recognition, drought/ flooding responses and wound responses. Appropriate germplasm will be sourced and used in functional hypothesis testing. Forage characterisation will be performed by use of chemometrics (FTIR, Micro RAMAN, GC-MS, LC-MS) with multivariate data analysis to understand inputs delivered by the feed and the extent of its genetic control. High throughput screens under development will enable assessment of methanogenic properties of large numbers of forage genotypes. This will exploit the extensive genetic resources at IBERS, for example, ~14,000 populations of the forage grass Lolium perenne. The combination of high throughput screening and genetic variation of defined pedigree presents the opportunity to develop and use machine learning approaches such as genetic algorithms (GA) to streamline screening and selection by operating a virtual evolution.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Not funded via Committee
Research Topics	Crop Science, Plant Science
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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