Omics in Livestock Animals: Improving Health, Well-being and Production

India has an extensive livestock wealth with a growing rate of 6% per annum with a crucial role in the Indian economy. The livestock sector is one of the important subsectors of agriculture, which contributes 25.6% of total agriculture GDP. The arrival of deep sequencing technologies such as Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) and Single Cell Sequencing (SCS) has produced huge sequence data that can be exploited to advance well being, health, reproduction and yield of livestocks by employment of integrated omics strategies. The current era of omics, i.e., genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, translatomics and single-cell sequencing, has considerably improved researcher's understanding of livestock research at the gene level and opened new avenues in terms of single-cell studies, which need to be carried out in the near future. NGS plays a crucial role in understanding the genetic mechanism of animal’s functions and its interaction with the environment. Furthermore, the SCS will provide insight into the functions of cell types in livestock species. The data generated using NGS and SCS approaches may help to discover novel molecular markers from the complete genome and develop global diagnostic methods for the detection of infectious diseases and their agents.

Keywords: Animal health, Livestock, NGS, Omics, Systems biology.