The Green Secrets of Goat Poop

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https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2021/02/09/goat-poop-and-green-tech/

Source: By Aliyah Kovner, Berkeley Lab News Center. 

Excerpt: Microbes found in the goat gut microbiome could help humans convert plant material into valuable, eco-friendly commodities. Converting the tough fibers and complex sugars in plants into biofuels and other products could be humanity’s ticket to smarter materials, better medicines, and a petroleum-free, sustainable future. But harnessing the chemical commodities stored in these molecules is no simple task. ...Hoping to discover new and improved ways of processing plant material for industrial purposes, scientists like Michelle O’Malley at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) and the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have been studying the gut microbiomes of the planet’s most prolific herbivores: ruminant animals such as goats. ...Berkeley lab scientists contributed to O’Malley’s latest study, published in Nature Microbiology. The team generated reconstructions of the many thousands of microbial genomes present in goat-poop samples – taken from a Santa Barbara Zoo resident named “Elway” – and helped identify genes for metabolic enzymes and other digestion-related proteins.... 

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