Our collaboration with Rod Mackie at the University of Illinois under the GPLER4 project Reducing hydrogen and methyl-compound production to mitigate rumen methane, requires co-culture studies with representative rumen methanogens. Methanobrevibacter sp. D5 is a useful methanogen in this regard and we would like to use in co-culture studies with Ruminococcus albus to study hydrogenase gene expression. The D5 genome sequence is also required for assign transcript to genes during RNAseq gene expression studies.