Novel Alternatives to Antibiotics By Kelsy Robinson
I am currently a fifth year Ph.D. student in the OSU Department of Animal and Food Sciences. Raised in southeast Arkansas, I obtained my bachelor’s degree in animal science from the University of Arkansas before joining OSU in June 2014 as a USDANIFA National Needs Fellow. I was the first student accepted directly to the department’s Ph.D. program without a master’s degree. I began my research career working in Glenn Zhang’s lab to discover novel alternatives to antibiotics. During my first two years at OSU, I focused on the ability of dietary compounds to modulate host immunity in an effort to improve animal growth and prevent disease. This work, both in vitro and in vivo, laid the foundation for the current work of other students in our department investigating the ability of these compounds to alleviate necrotic enteritis in broiler chickens.
PHOTOS / REBEKAH ALFORD
14
With the advent of the nextgeneration sequencing technologies, the ability to analyze and interpret big data has become a vital part of biological research. I became more interested in the field of gut microbiome and bioinformatics, and was drawn to the wealth of knowledge that sequencing data can produce. Plus, I loved the challenge of learning an entirely new field. Each experiment and set of data is a new puzzle to figure out. As the technology advances, there is always something new to learn. Currently, I am working on several microbiome and bioinformatics projects focused on the relationship between intestinal microbes and animal growth performance in broiler chickens. Investigations into the intestinal microbial community, the
microbiota, of humans and mice have demonstrated a strong relationship between the microbiota composition and host health and metabolism. However, less is known about the role of the microbiota in livestock, particularly where broiler chickens are concerned. As livestock production moves into the antibiotic-free era, I believe modulation of the intestinal microbiota holds great promise to improve animal growth and feed efficiency. My research involves raising broiler chickens from hatch to market age in order to collect intestinal samples on a weekly basis. Host and microbial DNA or RNA is then isolated for next-generation sequencing. I use various bioinformatic programs to analyze the large sequencing data
