Scientists Identify Promising Factors to Determine Disease Resilience

May 11, 2020

Scientists are identifying promising approaches for evaluating the resilience of genetic stock to disease challenges. Since 2015 an international team of scientists has been contributing to a natural disease challenge model for evaluating the resilience of swine to disease.

Dr. John Harding, a professor with the Western College of Veterinary Medicine, says the work, which is centered at the CDPQ wean to finish commercial research facilities in Quebec, is intended to identify factors that can determine disease resilience in genetic stock.

Clip-Dr. John Harding-Western College of Veterinary Medicine:

One of the most promising and the earliest one we found is called variation in feed intake or feed duration. Animals that have quite variable feed intake, so when they go into a heavily challenged period in their life, they drop off feed intake quite dramatically and then it comes back up, those animals are less resilient.

We can actually measure feed intake on an individual basis, calculate the variation on a daily basis and use that as a very good predicter of resilience. There are some promising immune measures that we've come up with.

These are phenotypic measures that are gathered in the quarantine nursery so that would mimic what we could gather in the genetic nucleolus or multiplication farm. Some of those are natural antibodies.

There's a couple of mitogen assays, so how we use blood cells to stimulate them in the laboratory and measure how those cells change over time. Another very promising one is called the high immune response technology. That is measures of both the antibody and the cellular immune response that we can do in a high health situation and that appears to correlate with disease resilience as well.

Source : Farmscape

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.