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.
