Section: Application Domains

Animal digestive ecosystem

Ruminants absorb plant cells, mainly constituted by cellulose, from which the microbial population of their digestive system extracts carbon and energy to provide proteins and energetic molecules. This bio-conversion produces also important quantities of methane, a gas responsible of part of the greenhouse effect (the billion of cows on earth reject 20% of the methane linked to human activities). INRA researchers have shown that this methane production could be reduced by 30% by changing the proportion of fat acids in the their food, that also implies that the composition of their microbial ecosystem is modified.

This application domain of the microbial ecology is at an early stage. URH team (Unité de Recherche sur les Herbivores, Clermont) has developed an artificial rumen that is close to a chemostat, for testing different kind of nutrition diets. Preliminaries contacts have been taken, and a modelling demand has been clearly formulated and will be taken up my MODEMIC. This theme falls into the research priorities for the environment preservation.