Guided Biotics® for the targeted reduction of ammonia production in agricultural practices

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Ammonia is a caustic, highly irritating gas that poses several health and environmental concerns. Emissions of ammonia are particularly problematic in agricultural practices, which account for 88% of the UK's total ammonia emissions. Livestock housing is the main contributor to ammonia production, and it is here where the emissions can have severe consequences on the welfare and productivity of the animals, in addition to the safety of farm workers. Poultry are second only behind cattle in their contribution to ammonia emissions (DEFRA, 2020), and excessive ammonia levels in poultry housing renders the birds more susceptible to bacterial infections and is economically damaging for the farmer. The environmental impact of these emissions is especially harmful in areas of intensive poultry production, such as the Wye Valley. Here, river ecosystems are being decimated because ammonia leads to eutrophication; an excessive richness of nutrients in water bodies due to run-off from the farmland that gives rise to algal blooms.Digestion of dietary protein results in the excretion of uric acid and urea in the litter. Under favourable conditions, enzymes produced by microorganisms in the environment are then responsible for converting these into ammonia. Current strategies for controlling ammonia emissions are very much focussed on providing environmental conditions that slow the rate of ammonia generation; or involve the use of harsh chemicals to remediate or inhibit the activity of the enzymes that result in ammonia production. However, none of these strategies deal with the root source of the problem: production of the microbial enzymes that facilitate ammonia production.FOLIUM Science has developed a range of friendly, probiotic bacteria for use as a feed additive or environmental cleanup that can precisely and efficaciously reduce the production of specific bacterial enzymes. These probiotics contain naturally occurring elements that allow them to deploy the immune system of bacteria, called CRISPR-Cas, to specifically target regions of DNA that are responsible for the production of ammonia-generating enzymes. The proposed project will allow FOLIUM to develop this technology so that it can tackle the broad range of ammonia-producing enzymes likely to be found in the farm environment, and to ensure that the success of the technology translates from the lab to the farm. FOLIUM Science is well versed with development of products for the poultry sector and it is hoped that the successes of this project could be adapted to tackle ammonia production in other agricultural practices in the future.