Antimicrobial use, PRRS, and the microbiome with McKnight Land-Grant Professor Noelle Noyes

Dr. Noelle Noyes received the 2022 McKnight Land-Grant Professorship for her work on Microbes for Sustainable Intensification of Livestock Production. As the human population expands, so does its demand for protein. Livestock farmers must meet this demand, but their land and water are shrinking rapidly, meaning they must produce more with less. Dr. Noyes confronts this challenge through scientific discovery of the livestock microbiome.

Noyes receives 2022 McKnight Land-Grant Professorship

In one of their latest studies in collaboration with Pipestone Systems and Dr. Peter Davies, the Noyes lab evaluates the impact of antimicrobial use on resistance patterns in PRRS-infected pigs. The publication is available in open access in the Applied and Environmental Microbiology journal.

Despite a recognized need for more longitudinal studies to assess the effects of antimicrobial use on resistance in food animals, they remain sparse in the literature, and most longitudinal studies of pigs have been observational. The current experimental study had the advantages of greater control of potential confounding, precise measurement of antimicrobial exposures which differed markedly between groups and tracking of pigs until market age. Overall, resistance patterns were remarkably stable between the treatment groups over time, and the differences observed could not be readily reconciled with the antimicrobial exposures, indicating the likely importance of other determinants of antimicrobial resistance at the population level.

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PRRS RFLP, what is it and how we use them?

This is our Friday rubric: every week a new Science Page from the Bob Morrison’s Swine Health Monitoring Project. The previous editions of the science page are available on our website.

This week, the University of Minnesota (Mariana Kikuti, Igor Paploski, Marcello Melini, and Cesar Corzo) explains RFLPs, how they are used today and some of their pitfalls.

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What monitoring taught us about PRRS: a podcast episode

Dr. Cesar Corzo shares what he has learned about PRRS since becoming the lead investigator of the Morrison Swine Health Monitoring Project (MSHMP) in an episode of the Swine Doc Pod with Carthage.

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Meet our graduate students in swine health and production

Graduate students are at the core of our research efforts to deliver science-based solutions to solve the swine industry’s problems. You may be familiar with their names through scientific publications or you may have seen them present the results of their research at various conferences but they deserve a proper introduction. Meet our 2021-2022 graduate students!

Part of the UMN swine group at the AASV annual meeting in February 2022.
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Experimental pig study confirms the high virulence of the recently emerged PRRSV 1-4-4 L1C variant strain

This is our Friday rubric: every week a new Science Page from the Bob Morrison’s Swine Health Monitoring Project. The previous editions of the science page are available on our website.

In today’s Science Page we learn about the findings of a study conducted by researchers at Iowa State University inoculating pigs with the 1-4-4 L1C variant.

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