Developing Probiotic Yeast for Improved Cattle Feed Efficiency and Methane Emission Reduction

Methanogenic microbes in cattle rumen are responsible for nearly 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. These methanogens while not vital to the cow's health consume up to 12% of its feed energy. All other methane reduction products in development either lack scalability or are prohibitively expensive. In contrast Hoofprint Biome is innovating a solution that increases cattle profitability and eliminates methane. Our groundbreaking discovery is a library of lytic peptides that putatively eliminate rumen methanogens stopping cattle emissions at their source. We propose to secrete these anti- methanogen peptides in the rumen using a probiotic yeast Saccharomyces boulardii which has already been proven to increase milk yield and feed efficiency by over 5%. Our prior work with S. boulardii led to a tenfold increase in peptide secretion against a different microbe. This proposal aims to identify the most potent and consistent anti-methangen peptides from our library and engineer their secretion from the enhanced S. boulardii. The successful completion of this phase I proposal will yield a scalable anti-methane probiotic ready for field trials. The phase II proposal will support milk yield feed efficiency and methane reduction trials from cattle. If successful our product could enhance dairy and beef profitability by over 25% and and play an essential role in the US hitting 1.5 °C emissions reduction targets.