Livestock Nutrition

Biography

Biography: A K Thiruvenkadan

Abstract

Nutrition and health are closely linked, but despite decades of study, the intricate interactions between diet and many aspects of human and animal health is poorly understood. The advent of high-throughput technologies to study an animal's genome, proteome, and metabolome constituted a setback to the use of reductionism in livestock research. More recent development of "next-generation sequencing" tools was instrumental in allowing in-depth studies of the microbiome in the rumen and other sections of the gastrointestinal tract. Omics, along with bioinformatics, constitutes the foundation of modern systems biology to enhance understanding of the complex biological interactions occurring within cells and tissues at the gene, protein, and metabolite level. Genomic revolution has propelled the development of several new technologies that can be applied in nutritional sciences. Molecular nutrition in terms of nutrigenomics will serve as a new tool for nutritional research in mitigating the problems related to animal health and production. The innovations in nutrition research with use of various molecular technologies will indubitably update our basic understanding of nutrient gene interrelationship and help to define new methods for managing animal production. Finally by targeting the specific gene through nutritional manipulation, it may be possible to get the desired livestock performance in terms of health as well as production. I present examples of new knowledge generated through the application of functional analyses of transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data sets encompassing nutritional management of dairy cows, pigs, and poultry. Published work to date underscores that the integrative approach across and within tissues may prove useful for fine-tuning nutritional management of livestock. An important goal during this process is to uncover key molecular players involved in the organismal adaptations to nutrition.