March 2023 – Swine in Minnesota

Seasonality of PEDV incidence in breeding herds during endemic transmission in the U.S.

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.

University of Minnesota researchers Mariana Kikuti, Xiaomei Yue, Marcello Melini, Emily Geary, Paulo Fioravante, and Cesar Corzo share information regarding how seasons affect PEDV incidents in breeding herds in this week’s Science Page.

Predicting Antigenic Distance from Genetic Data for PRRSV-Type 1

Today, we are sharing a new publication from the VanderWaal research lab at the UMN. In this article published in Microbiology Spectrum, Dr. Dennis Makau et al. estimated the likelihood of serum-virus cross-protection between PRRSV-1 viruses and identified important amino acid sites influencing antigenic variability between viruses. Additionally, they investigated how differences in those amino acid sites contributes to the antigenic variability between the viral isolates.

IMPORTANCE Understanding cross-protection between cocirculating PRRSV1 strains is crucial to reducing losses associated with PRRS outbreaks on farms. While experimental studies to determine cross-protection are instrumental, these in vivo studies are not always practical or timely for the many cocirculating and emerging PRRSV strains. In this study, we demonstrate the ability to rapidly estimate potential immunologic cross-reaction between different PRRSV1 strains in silico using sequence data routinely collected by production systems. These models can provide fast turn-around information crucial for improving PRRS management decisions such as selecting vaccines/live virus inoculation to be used on farms and assessing the risk of outbreaks by emerging strains on farms previously exposed to certain PRRSV strains and vaccine development among others.

Influenza in swine: the latest updates – A podcast episode

Despite the many advances throughout the years, influenza still cannot be fully controlled and represents a major economic threat to the swine industry. Therefore, we can never discuss it enough and it’s never too late to tackle this challenge. In this podcast host Laura Greiner and guests Dr. Jeremy Pittman and Dr. Marie Culhane have a roundtable conversation about the latest updates about influenza, diagnostics and surveillance, and key strategies to manage those.

Best of Leman 2022: John Fairbrother – How whole genome sequencing can help to understand the changing face of pathogenic Escherichia coli in pigs

This is our most popular series on the blog. Once a month, we are sharing with you a presentation given at the Allen D. Leman swine conference, on topics that the swine group found interesting, innovative or that lead to great discussions.

You can find all of the presentations selected from previous conferences on the blog here.

This presentation was originally given by Dr. John Fairbrother of the University of Montreal on September 19, 2022.

Time to a new PRRS outbreak in naïve breeding herds

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, MSHMP researchers Mariana Kikuti, Catalina Picasso-Risso, Claudio Marcello Melini and Cesar Corzo share data regarding the time it takes for naïve breeding herds to break with PRRSV.