Harnessing Pre-Industrial Genomes to Predict Livestock Adaptation to Global Warming

The effects of global warming on both wild and domesticated animals are a major concern, particularly in relation to heat stress and its impact on livestock.

Populations often can adapt to changing environments, but that is unlikely to happen for livestock now due to the speed of global warming and the loss of genetic diversity resulting from recently intensified breeding practices. This project seeks to investigate the adaptive capabilities of breeds to future climatic conditions.

Considering that loss of genetic diversity and temperate increase both date to the last centuries, I hypothesize that most breeds are better adapted to pre-industrial climates than to today´s climate, and that their gene pool has limited potential to cope with future conditions.

Using sheep as a model species and ancient DNA techniques, this project will assess the gene pool of populations prior to the Industrial Revolution.

I will then use a newly developed statistical method to study adaptation to pre-industrial climates and identify genetic variants that could allow adaptation to future climates.

Finally, this information will be used to predict the adaptive capabilities of certain sheep breeds to future climatic conditions.

The findings will inform breeding and conservation efforts, and could ultimately help future animal breeds cope with global warming.

The methods developed in this project have broad potential applications for other livestock as well as wild animal species.