Livestock Viral Diseases and Insights into Systems Biology

With the increasing human population, livestock farming has been intensified over the years to support different products from farm animals. Hence, the requirement to monitor livestock diseases becomes critical. In particular, outbreaks due to viral diseases are a major concern for the livestock industry worldwide. It has been observed that close interaction of humans-livestock could lead to transboundary diseases. Hence detection of potential viral pathogens requires a deeper understanding of the livestock virome. The rapid development of bioinformatics and computational tools, as well as advances in Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies, has opened up new options for infectious disease surveillance in terms of both quality and scale. The phrase “systems biology” has just been recently adopted to define cutting-edge cross-disciplinary biology research. Synthetic biology, integrative biology, systems biomedicine, and metagenomics are some of the growing post-genomic domains that intersect with systems biology. Systems biology represents a paradigm shift in biology and medicine from many perspectives by incorporating a new culture that acknowledges the dynamic and interdependent interactions of the complex network of genes and their associated proteins in order to gain a systematic understanding of biology, health, and disease. By enhancing our understanding of viral disease development, diagnosis, prevention, and therapy, the application of systems biology to human and veterinary medicine has the potential to transform healthcare. The current chapter focuses on examples of various viral diseases associated with livestock animals and the role of systems biology approaches to understand them. 

Keywords: Animal viruses, African swine fever, Avian influenza, Bovine respiratory disease, Bovine herpesvirus-1, Co-expression, Global virome project, Livestock diseases, NGS, Newcastle disease virus, RNA-seq, Systems biology.