Use of peptide-phage display libraries to discover targets for bioactives and vaccination against rumen methanogens

Summary

​Methane is the main greenhouse gas emitted from livestock and represents about 70% (CO2-e) of the agriculture sector’s emissions and more than 10% of net national emissions. The goal of the project was to develop a strategy to reduce methane emissions in ruminants which are the main contributors to livestock emissions.

We aimed to achieve this through the use of oligopeptides that directly inhibited rumen methanogens, as well as identifying their protein targets on the cell wall of methanogens which could then be used to raise antibodies in a vaccination strategy.