Omics approaches to enhance and preserve local livestock breeds

Biodiversity includes the variety of life forms on earth, including plants, animals and microorganisms. In animal husbandry, biodiversity is essential to maintain genetic variability. This in turn enables sustainable farming by preventing susceptibility to diseases and mitigating the effects of environmental changes. With a world population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, we are witnessing a strong intensification of breeding with high-productivity breeds. This trend affects biodiversity as the not highly productive local breeds are often replaced. The consequent loss of biodiversity poses an international challenge to enhance and preserve local livestock breeds to not only preserve biodiversity to face global environmental changes, but also protect the cultural heritage they represent. In fact, local breeds are an invaluable source of cultural, historical and genetic heritage since they possess adaptive genetic traits to the often difficult environment they inhabit, e.g. by remaining productive despite consuming low quality forage thanks to a unique microbiota composition that helps digestion and absorption of nutrients. Italy, with its rich history and heterogeneous climates, is home to several livestock breeds. Sicily, in particular, hosts rather rich animal biodiversity. Often, not much information is available for local breeds: we do not know their past and present history, some of them are still not recognized as breeds, and are often crossed with other cosmopolitan breeds, ultimately damaging their peculiar genetic characteristics. With this thesis, I explore the use of omics sciences, to enhance and preserve Sicilian biodiversity and beyond. Through metagenomics define the microbial composition of local breeds to understand how better adaptability often includes better digestive capacity. With population genetics, analyse the evolutionary histories of different native breeds and provide the tools to understand and enhance genetic diversity, which is instrumental to develop informed conservation strategies.