Annual Review of Animal Biosciences最新文献

In low- and lower-middle-income countries, livestock systems contribute to food and nutritional security, economic growth, and the livelihoods of nearly one billion smallholders. They provide high-quality nutrition through animal-sourced foods, contribute to improved smallholder resilience, and employ more than 873 million people. Yet, persistent feed constraints exacerbated by climate change, land degradation, poor extension, feed markets, and social inequalities continue to undermine livestock productivity. This article explores how feed-focused interventions can deliver a triple win for food and nutrition security, climate resilience, and women and youth empowerment. It reviews the complexity of the regional feed systems and underlying constraints and proposes strategies to improve feed quality, availability, accessibility, and affordability, particularly through greater inclusion of women and youth, who are pivotal to the sector. The article recommends scaling evidence-based strategies to transform feed systems into inclusive and climate-smart systems that optimally enhance livestock productivity, reduce food insecurity, and improve the livelihoods of farmers and pastoralists.

Recent advances in technologies that replicate specific aspects of embryogenesis in vitro by using stem cells have opened new frontiers in our understanding of the earliest steps of mammalian development and creation of promising novel assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). We begin by summarizing the widely used ARTs in improving animal reproduction. We then explore current progress in deriving embryo-based stem cells from livestock species and highlight the latest breakthroughs in blastoid generation. Furthermore, we examine the potential applications of blastoids in domestic livestock and discuss key challenges and future directions for advancing blastoid models that closely mimic natural embryonic development.

Livestock farming faces increasing demands for sustainability and improved animal welfare. Noninvasive approaches for monitoring animal health and physiology are of growing interest. Exhaled breath analysis, or exhalomics, has emerged as a promising tool for detecting volatile organic compounds and gases associated with metabolism, disease states, physiological processes, and microbiome in livestock. This review synthesizes current advancements in breath sampling and analytical technologies and evaluates applications in disease diagnostics, nutritional assessment, and physiological and microbial profiling across livestock species. Although progress is evident, key challenges remain, including sampling variability, incomplete metabolite annotation, and limited scalability for field use. Future efforts should prioritize standardizing protocols; expanding livestock-specific spectral libraries; and developing affordable, real-time sensors for on-farm deployment. Integrating exhalomics with multi-omics and artificial intelligence-driven analytics holds potential to enable earlier disease detection, improve production efficiency, and reduce environmental impacts, ultimately advancing precision livestock farming and animal welfare over the coming decade.

DNA methylation was the earliest epigenetic mark discovered-it is essential for mammalian development and forms a molecular memory that can transcend generations, as in the phenomenon of genomic imprinting. Set against this long-term potential, methylation is dynamic across the life cycle, with genome-wide changes at germ-cell specification, gametogenesis, and preimplantation development accompanying major shifts in cell potency. With a tool kit of precision genetic reagents, the mouse has been a mainstay in developing mechanistic understanding of how methylation is targeted to the genome and in exploring its susceptibility to environmental factors, such as parental diet. The availability of genome sequence from many more species combined with the ability to profile methylation and other epigenetic marks in very small numbers of cells now provides rich epigenomic information from other mammals. This information has begun to reveal both similarities as well as surprising differences in the way in which methylation is patterned across the genome among mammals. Such knowledge will be critical in assessing the outcomes of interventions during assisted reproduction in human clinical practice and livestock production.

This article charts the history of a scientific career that began in the plant sciences and is ending in research on the placenta-brain axis and on the developmental origins of the mammalian placenta. In the middle was the characterization of uteroferrin and interferon-τ, the role of the latter in maternal recognition of pregnancy, and the development of a commercial pregnancy test for dairy cows. The article also emphasizes the roles personal upheavals and happenchance played in shaping a professional life and dealing with an incident of scientific malfeasance that threatened it. The article concludes with a discussion of the difficulties of practicing science during the twilight years.

Liver function is critical for high-producing dairy cows to achieve high milk production and good fertility, as well as to avoid periparturient health problems. Key processes include gluconeogenesis, fatty acid metabolism, protein synthesis, amino acid metabolism and urea formation, bile acid synthesis, detoxification, endocrine functions, and immune functions. Various tests have been used to assess liver function. Fatty liver develops when fatty acid uptake exceeds the liver's capacity to oxidize fatty acids and export triacylglycerols and may negatively affect hepatic function. Metabolomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics are opening new insights into hepatic adaptations in normal and abnormal situations, such as the roles of acylcarnitines, lysophospholipids, and sphingolipids. Nutritional strategies such as controlled energy dry cow diets and supplemental rumen-protected methionine and choline help maintain liver function during the periparturient period. Nutritional manipulations that impact liver function help to promote health and productivity of high-producing dairy cows.

Rodents have been the primary model for mammalian nutritional physiology for decades. Despite an extensive body of literature, controversies remain around the effects of specific nutrients and total energy intake on several aspects of nutritional biology, even in this well-studied model. One approach that is helping to bring clarity to the field is the geometric framework for nutrition (GFN). The GFN is a multidimensional paradigm that can be used to conceptualize nutrition and nutritional effects, design experiments, and interpret results. To date, more than 30 publications have applied the GFN to data from rodent models of nutrition. Here we review the major conclusions from these studies. We pay particular attention to the effects of macronutrients on satiety, glucose metabolism, lifespan and the biology of aging, reproductive function, immune function, and the microbiome. We finish by highlighting several knowledge gaps that became evident upon reviewing this literature.

This comprehensive review explores the complex processes of reproduction, pregnancy establishment, and pregnancy diagnostic methods in cattle, sheep, goats, swine, horses, and camelids. It provides an overview of the history of pregnancy detection and an in-depth exploration of the physiology of pregnancy in livestock. The detection of conceptus tissue and fluids, conceptus-produced hormones, and maternal responses to conceptus signals, crucial for pregnancy diagnosis, are also discussed in detail, as are emerging methods for pregnancy diagnosis in livestock species. Overall, this review emphasizes the direct impact of pregnancy diagnosis and efficient pregnancy management for profitability of livestock enterprises.

Studies examining the evolution of genomes have focused mainly on sequence conservation. However, the inner working of a cell implies tightly regulated crosstalk between complex gene networks controlled by small dispersed regulatory elements of physically contacting DNA regions. How these different levels of chromatin organization crosstalk in different species underpins the potential for genome evolutionary plasticity. We review the evolution of chromatin organization across the Animal Tree of Life. We introduce general aspects of the mode and tempo of genome evolution to later explore the multiple layers of genome organization. We argue that both genome and chromosome size modulate patterns of chromatin folding and that chromatin interactions facilitate the formation of lineage-specific chromosomal reorganizations, especially in germ cells. Overall, analyzing the mechanistic forces involved in the maintenance of chromatin structure and function of the germ line is critical for understanding genome evolution, maintenance, and inheritance.

Nutrition is a complex and contested area in biomedicine, which requires diverse evidence sources. Nonhuman primate models are considered an important biomedical research tool because of their biological similarities to humans, but they are typically used with little explicit consideration of their ecology and evolution. Using the rhesus macaque (RM), we consider the potential of nutritional ecology for enriching the use of primates as models for human nutrition. We introduce some relevant aspects of RM evolutionary and social ecology and discuss two examples where they have been used in biomedical research: obesity and aging. We next consider how insights from nutritional ecology can help inform and direct the use of RM as a biomedical model. We conclude by illustrating how conceptual tools might inform the use of RM as a model for human nutrition and extracting insights from RM that might be relevant to broader theoretical considerations around animal model systems.