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ARS Home » Midwest Area » Ames, Iowa » National Animal Disease Center » Food Safety and Enteric Pathogens Research » Research » Research Project #448169

Research Project: Alternatives to Antibiotics: Neonatal Immunomodulation to Improve Disease Resilience in Food Animals - ISU

Location: Food Safety and Enteric Pathogens Research

Project Number: 5030-32000-225-037-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement

Start Date: May 15, 2025
End Date: Apr 30, 2026

Objective:
Our overall goal is to utilize innate training as an approach to enhance disease resistance in a manner that is highly relevant to agriculture. Thus, one objective to meet the goal is to identify molecular mechanisms of induced training to develop additional approaches to induce innate training in food animals. The efficacy of Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) as an immunomodulator will be evaluated in pigs and samples will be collected for molecular analysis to identify molecular mechanisms of training. Cooperator will assist in data analysis, includeing ATAC-Seq, ChIP-seq, and RNA-seq data, with integration of various datasets to identify relationships between DNA accessibility and gene expression related to innate training. Cooperator will also finish analysis of already collected data from porcine and bovine samples.

Approach:
Cells from piglets receiving mock treatment or BCG will be collected for ATAC-Seq, ChIP-seq, RNA-seq data generation. Data will be provided to the cooperator for analysis in a collaborative manner. Data analysis on already collected bovine and porcine samples will be completed. ARS and Cooperator will collaborate to report research findings.