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.
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.
Continue reading “Antimicrobial use, PRRS, and the microbiome with McKnight Land-Grant Professor Noelle Noyes”