Milk it for all it’s worth!
With the panic of the Swine Flu spreading around, at least we now a little bit more about the cow. After a six year effort with more than 300 scientists from 25 countries around the world, the cow’s genome has been decoded. The cow in question, a Hereford name L1 Dominette
, is one of the types of cows commonly found on our plates (well, not mine… I’m a vegetarian).
L1 Dominette sounds a little too “barcode-ish” for me – lets call her Daisy. With Daisy’s genome decoded, scientists and agriculturalists have a deeper insight as to which cows and bulls to breed to create the strongest dairy producing animals. Using this info to impact the meat market is likely soon to follow.
As interesting and important as genome decoding is, I’m curious to know what can be made of this data apart from contributions to better the human food chain. Haven’t humans already been manipulating cow breeding behavior for years through hormones and selective breeding? We’ve already figured out how to produce the most desired traits by breeding two cows together, and we didn’t need gene sequencing to point us in that direction. 
Harris Lewin, a geneticist who worked on the project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, discussed other uses for the gene decoding apart from food consumption. This information could help us breed cows that produce less methane, a highly dangerous greenhouse gas.
Or, better yet, maybe this could help lead to better developments on how to trap methane and convert it to a usable gas! Changing their diets has proved to reduce methane production, as a study performed in 2008 in Argentina showed. The Argentinian team even developed a sort of cow backpack to trap the methane as a test of measurement. While methane also comes from coal mines, landfills, and gas pipes, an estimated 30 percent of Argentina’s green house gas emissions could come from cows alone.
Daisy’s genes might be more precious to the environment than they are to our bellies.
