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Scientists turn to Nobel Prize-winning gene editing tool to reduce dairy methane emissions

UC Davis animal science professors Ermias Kebreab and Matthias Hess, right, stand together in the cow dairy facilities on April 10, 2023. They won the TED Audacious award with UC Berkeley and UCSF for their work with dairy cows.
Gregory Urquiaga
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Gregory Urquiaga
UC Davis animal science professors Ermias Kebreab and Matthias Hess, right, stand together in the cow dairy facilities on April 10, 2023. They won the TED Audacious award with UC Berkeley and UCSF for their work with dairy cows.

Read the transcript for this report below.


ALEX BURKE, HOST: Scientists at the University of California are introducing a new tool in the fight for cleaner cow burps – which produce the greenhouse gas known as methane. KVPR’s Kerry Klein reports.

KERRY KLEIN: The tool is CRISPR, The Nobel Prize-winning technology that can alter an organism’s DNA. The DNA it’s targeting isn’t in the cow, but in the micro-organisms in its gut. According to Matthias Hess, an animal scientist at UC Davis, these microbes help produce the milk and meat we love, but also the methane.

MATTHIAS HESS: So we want to change microbes in a way that we increase maybe the productivity of the animal and the health, but at the same time reduce the emission of methane.

KLEIN: Hess and colleagues at UC Davis, Berkeley and San Francisco were just awarded $70 million for the initiative from the Audacious Project, an offshoot of the company that created TED Talks. It’s actually the company’s largest grant to date. Hess says their methane reductions goals are audacious.

HESS: The target is, we want to go down or to reduce it by 70%, that’s the goal.

KLEIN: So, how to tweak those microbes? The plan, says Hess, is to create a pill, supplement or even a virus that cattle can eat. For KVPR News, I'm Kerry Klein.

Kerry Klein is an award-winning reporter whose coverage of public health, air pollution, drinking water access and wildfires in the San Joaquin Valley has been featured on NPR, KQED, Science Friday and Kaiser Health News. Her work has earned numerous regional Edward R. Murrow and Golden Mike Awards and has been recognized by the Association of Health Care Journalists and Society of Environmental Journalists. Her podcast Escape From Mammoth Pool was named a podcast “listeners couldn’t get enough of in 2021” by the radio aggregator NPR One.