animal science

#IAmScience Rachel Carroll

November 20, 2020 By Becca Wolf in #IAmScience Tags: animal science

By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC

Growing up with many pets and watching Animal Planet, Rachel Carroll, a master’s student in the Wes Warren lab at Bond Life Sciences Center, has known one thing about what she wanted to do for a living.

“I just decided that I wanted to find a career where I could work with animals,” Carroll said. “As I got older, I realized that there are a lot of things affecting our planet that are causing some of these animals and ecosystems to disappear. These ecosystems are important, and their disappearance really refined my idea of what it would mean to work in the wildlife conservation field and the importance of it.”

Carroll initially graduated with a degree in Animal Sciences with a minor in Captive Wild Management in 2017 from Mizzou. In her three years since, she was able to gain experience out in the field. Carroll began by working in the education department at the Sea Life Aquarium in Kansas City before getting an internship at Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida, where she aided in wild animal rescues as a part of the Marine Animal Rescue Team.

These were not typical animal rescues. She focused on manatee and sea turtle rescues, taking sick or injured animals back to the aquarium to bring them back to health.

“One rescue in particular that was very interesting for me was a water-based rescue. We were in a boat with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Services and we were trying to drop a net so we could catch a manatee that was pretty sick and carry it into the rescue van to drive it off to the rehab facility,” Carroll said. “It was pretty exciting but a little nerve-wracking because the captain of the boat was telling us, ‘Be careful because there’s a lot of [sting] rays and sharks in this area, so watch where you land when you jump out.’”

Despite having to watch out for dangerous animals, Carroll enjoyed the field work.

“I just love the manatees, they’re so cute and fun to work with. It was really rewarding whenever it was a successful rescue mission because that didn’t always happen, unfortunately. I really liked being able to be part of the conservation work in that aspect,” Carroll said.

Manatees used to be on the endangered species list in the United States, however in 2017, their status was changed to ‘threatened.’ These large, squishy animals are commonly found on the coast of the southeastern United States.

“The manatees were definitely my favorite,” Carroll said. “Being able to work with them has been super interesting and because they’re still a species of conservation concern, I still felt like what we were doing there was super relevant for them.”

Carroll began her Master’s degree this August.

Carroll has hit the ground running, and soon started two wildlife conservation genetics projects at Bond LSC.

One of Carroll’s projects looks at multiple ocular coloboma in snow leopards. This rare congenital eye anomaly causes the eye to stop growing before it is fully developed. Its cause is unknown, and Carroll is investigating potential mutations that could provide a genetic explanation for why it occurs.

She also works on a project on transitional cell cancer (TCC), a rare bladder cancer, found in older fishing cats. These spotted, medium-sized cats are found in southeast Asia and are currently endangered. Like multiple ocular coloboma in snow leopards, the cause of TCC is unknown in fishing cats. In addition to looking at TCC, Carroll is also compiling a reference genome assembly for fishing cats that can be used for future studies in regards to disease and population.

Carroll is also compiling pedigrees for captive individuals of these species that look at the relativeness within each captive population and the frequency of disease in captive individuals.

“Hopefully, this can be used for better captive population management in the future, which will benefit genetic diversity for the global population as a whole,” Carroll said.

While she is not getting the same hands-on experience as she did in the field, Carroll has been enjoying seeing the other side of conservation work in the lab.

“From the research side of it, we’re not handling any animals,” Carroll said. “Obviously, we don’t have any snow leopards inside the lab. That’d be a little hard to do, but it is really cool because the work that we’re doing is impactful in a different way.”

Carroll still has a long way to go in these projects. The Warren lab recently began receiving samples from other zoos and facilities. With these samples, they are able to begin sequencing genetic information.

In the meantime, Carroll has been enjoying her time back in Columbia with her dog, Willow. She affectionately calls Willow “insane” and “sweet.”

“She’s so sweet and loving that I can overlook her scatterbrain,” Carroll said. “Everyone always tells me that she looks like a miniature Scooby Doo.”

#IAmScience Karl Kerns

October 24, 2020 By Becca Wolf in #IAmScience Tags: animal science, bioinformatics

By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC

It’s all about the journey and Karl Kerns has been places.

Originally from a small town in southwestern Iowa, Kerns did his undergrad years at Iowa State University (ISU), taking internships in Maryland, Texas, southeast Asia, and southern Australia, among other places that focused on animal physiology and fertilization.

“I do like traveling just in the sense of vacation. I like having a purpose while traveling. It’s hard for me to sit back and relax and be in vacation mode,” Kerns said.

This focus and determination eventually brought him to Mizzou where he completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the Dong Xu lab at Bond Life Sciences Center this past spring, co-advised with Peter Sutovsky and Susanta Behura in the Division of Animal Sciences. Kerns was initially attracted to MU for his doctoral training because of the reputation of the animal sciences’ reproductive physiology program, but he then joined Bond LSC to continue his research during his USDA NIFA Postdoctoral Fellowship.

“MU is a world class institution. There are not many places that offer the resources we are fortunate to have here with the combination of animal science, veterinary medicine, and the resources of a research hospital system,” Kerns said. “And it’s not just equipment resources, but also intellect and the people that we [Bond LSC] have, it really provides an atmosphere that lets you dig into science a little bit deeper than you can anywhere else.”

This atmosphere at Bond LSC has aided Kerns in his current position as a newly-minted faculty member at ISU.

“It set me up for success. Especially in the middle of COVID right now, there’s not a lot of faculty positions available, so to get a faculty position when all those other positions were being halted, it speaks volumes to the training I received here,” Kerns said.

Kerns began teaching this fall semester, teaching Anatomy and Physiology labs twice a week.

Going back to his alma mater as a professor was not exactly the homecoming Kerns expected.

“It’s a very odd timeframe coming back during COVID when the buildings are not bustling with students and faculty.”

In the Xu lab, Kerns worked on bioinformatics and artificial intelligence with graduate students. They were able to incorporate machine and deep learning analysis with high throughput, single cell phenotyping, looking at multi-million cell data sets for bioimage analysis.

“There are multiple times that you step back from the microscope or from the computer after doing data analysis and you have so much awe and admiration for how all these intricate biological functions have to come together to support life,” Kerns said. “That is what fuels me.”

Kerns’ first publication at Mizzou was about how zinc, a vital micronutrient, helps regulate fertility in pigs, cattle, and humans.

“Research in the life sciences is extraordinarily rewarding because there is a time between initial discovery and publication that just you and your co-authors know this little piece of how life as we know it functions, previously unknown from the start of time,” Kerns said.

While he enjoys special moments like these in the lab, Kerns has been enjoying his time in the classroom with students during this isolating time of the pandemic as well.

“It’s my duty, being taxpayer funded in the training that I got, to make sure I teach the next generation,” Kerns said, “Let them have a taste of the cutting-edge technologies I learned at Mizzou and cutting-edge research findings that we found. The academia system is all about having people that are experts in a set area and passing it down to the next generation to expand on.”

Along with teaching, Kerns is also doing research at ISU. He is currently working on analyzing the fertility of boars and bulls to see what helps predict their fertility. Significant amounts of research and improvements focus on the female side of reproduction but not male, so by improving male fertility, Kerns will be able to help livestock producers and stakeholders improve their efficiency.

Kerns has big plans for his research in the future.

“Once we optimize male fertility, we can start taking superior genetics to third world countries that need a good protein source that can grow in their particular climate — we know protein is a source of complete amino acids that provides better cognitive function for people — and also provide a source of financial security for their families as well. It’s a win-win,” Kerns said.

Until then, Kerns plans to continue teaching and doing research. His science journey has taken him many places so far, and his is not stopping there.

“Science is always changing,” Kerns said. “When we say, ‘what does the science say?’ The science only says our current interpretation of it. In the grand scheme, we have so much more to learn. Every day we’re learning more about our world and not uncommonly disproving what we used to hold to as true because of new techniques now available to us.”

#IAmScience Alana Rodney

October 16, 2020 By Lauren Hines in #IAmScience Tags: animal science, cancer, MARC/IMSD

By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC

Research assistant Alana Rodney walked into her high school science class a few years ago expecting to fill another credit. However, it was there that she found her love of genetics.

“I just remember doing the lab and I learned how to use a pipette,” Rodney said. “I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness. This is so cool.’”

Fast forward to now and Rodney just completed her undergraduate degree in May 2019. And she’s not stopping there as she now pursues a master’s in animal science, genetics and genomics to create better treatments for common diseases and cancers.

“I want to eventually study cancers in humans and disease treatments for different types of cancers and other diseases that affect people in general, but especially the Black community because that’s really important to me,” Rodney said.

Rodney plans on eventually applying what she learns from the genome of cats to humans, especially cancer research.

“Cancer definitely has had a big effect on my family,” Rodney said. “A lot of people in my family have breast cancer and other types of diseases. I do think some of that is due to the environment that my family was in. I know that has a direct effect on the genetics of a person. So, some of this hits close to home for me.”

Rodney entered the world of research as an undergrad through the Initiative for Maximizing Student Diversity (IMSD) program. It is now called the Maximizing Access to Research Careers (MARC) program.

“The IMSD/MARC program is also one of the main reasons that I am in science right now,” Rodney said.

IMSD/MARC helps develop the research and professional skills of students from underrepresented groups by paying students to work in labs and exposing them to research.

“The IMSD/MARC program gave me a real sense of community in science,” Rodney said. “I was with a bunch of other students who have similar debt and probably wouldn’t be in grad school if it wasn’t for that program. It really gave me the motivation and push I needed to keep going even when school got hard. Having a community to really say, ‘Okay, let’s study. Okay, let’s talk about it.’”

For the past year, Rodney has been in the Wes Warren lab at the Bond Life Sciences Center working on bioinformatics and experiments for her thesis project.

“She’s been a joy to work with, and she’s very hungry to learn,” said Warren, a primary investigator at Bond LSC. “That’s what I really value in anybody that I work with.”

Rodney recently submitted her first paper to the journal Scientific Reports where she was the first author. The paper explored the effectiveness of whole-exome sequencing, (WES) which is a cost-effective strategy that sequences coding regions in DNA.

WES is usually used on human diseases that express multiple observable characteristics called, phenotypes. This makes it hard to classify which disease it is. WES also helps to identify alleles in genes that cause certain diseases.

In this instance, WES was applied to the DNA of diseased cats and was compared to the DNA of healthy cats as a baseline. WES discovered new variants — differences from the norm — for certain kidney disease in cats.

“That puts it out into the literature so that veterinarians and scientists that are interested in investigating that particular disease now have a candidate they can pursue,” Warren said.

The new variants were labeled as potential causative alleles of the kidney disease in cats.

“That was a nice paper to show that whole-exome sequencing in cats is possible, and that is a viable way to get data on the disease from the cats versus whole-genome sequencing. So basically, the paper just showed the effectiveness of whole-exome sequencing.”

Other strategies like whole genome sequencing cost more and provide slower results, so demonstrating WES as an effective option for research can help further the field.

In addition to her experiments, Rodney loves introducing children to the world of science.

“I’m really passionate about outreach and working with the youth and supporting them,” Rodney said. “I like to do science outreach, so I’ll go to elementary schools and talk with kids in the neighborhood, and if they want to do a science experiment, I’ll do it with them.”

Maybe in one of those science classrooms, Rodney can inspire a new student to pursue a field they love, just like her.

The taming of the brain

January 27, 2020 By Roger Meissen in Research Tags: animal science, Cheryl Rosenfeld, gene expression

Bond LSC scientist delves into how domestication alters the fox brain

Russian silver foxes that have been tamed show changes in their brains. | photo provided by Anna Kukekova

By Roger Meissen | Bond Life Sciences Center

You might be familiar with the idiom “don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” but when it comes to a certain lineage of tame Russian silver foxes it’s quite literal.

After more than 50 generations of breeding, these tame foxes likely offer insight into how selective breeding leads to domestication, and scientists dove deeper to look at what this trait might mean in terms of changes in the brain and the genes behind them.

“These silver foxes act like domesticated dogs and are assumingly a good model to look at the process of domestication, tracing what happened as the wolves became domesticated into what we recognize today as the domesticated dog. Wouldn’t that be fascinating to know all the things that coincide with that?” said Cheryl Rosenfeld, a Bond Life Sciences Center principal investigator at the University of Missouri and co-lead author on the study. “Presumably, to become domesticated the one biggest organ that would have to change is the brain, because that’s where fearfulness, aggression, and social behaviors emerge from, so my interest is in the brain and how various factors might affect it.”

The path away from aggression

While this story eventually focuses on the brain, the path to a modern model of tameness starts in Soviet Russia in the 1950s.

Russian geneticist Dmitry K. Belyaev bred hundreds of foxes in Siberia, initially selecting them based on their willingness to approach humans in their cage. In its beginning only 10 percent of those tested showed a weakened wild response, and those foxes were bred together to reinforce this docile nature. In later generations, their behavior was further evaluated based on their likelihood to interact with humans approaching their cage, their territorial behavior, response to attempts to pet them and reaction to the experimenter leaving the interaction. Lyudmila Trut, his intern now in her 80s and an author on this study, continues the breeding project.

“Those that showed a muted wild response would get bred together, so with each passing generation, the foxes showed diminished fear response. Once they established this tame fox population, they eventually developed the aggressive ones doing just the opposite in that they paired those foxes showing the most aggressive responses to an experimenter approaching the cage,” Rosenfeld said. “They repeated this over time and, ultimately, what they have now, going out 50 generations, are tame foxes that act and even look in some ways like pet dogs.”

The tame silver foxes love human interaction from attention to belly rubs, and exhibit traits like tail wagging, gazing into the faces of humans and a change in their barks. Physical changes accompanied these behavioral changes, with coat color shifting from silvered-black fur to a more mottled, piebald pattern, and tails becoming curly despite these traits not being intentional selected for by breeders. In contrast, those bred for aggression showed hyper aggressive responses to humans, as indicated by lunging at the cage.

The taming of the brain

A change in behavior as observed in these silver foxes likely comes with unseen shifts in genetics and brain function. Rosenfeld decided to look at these changes in the hypothalamus region of the brain with the help of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Cornell University, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia.

“We are interested in changes in gene expression associated with the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the main hormonal system involved in stress-response and it was very exciting and productive to collaborate with Dr. Rosenfeld and her colleagues on the analysis of gene expression in the hypothalamus of tame and aggressive foxes” said Anna Kukekova, the senior author and associate professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Rosenfeld compared genes in the hypothalamus between tame foxes and aggressive foxes as well as comparing them to genes in two other brain regions — the prefrontal cortex and the basal forebrain — significant in terms of learning and memory.

“The hypothalamus was a good target organ, because it controls social behaviors like getting along or gregariousness and usually hormones like the pro-social hormone oxytocin tends to increase in animals who are social,” Rosenfeld said. “We basically did a global approach, looking at every gene we could identify and how they differ in terms of expression between the tame and aggressive foxes.”

Among genes with differential hypothalamic expression in tame and aggressive foxes they found seven identical genes with the same pattern of expression between all three brain regions. It suggests that when you select for tameness that some genes will change regardless of brain region.

“It was interesting to us because these genes were involved in processes including cell division and making more neurons, differentiation, adhesion like how the cells contact each other, and the most surprising, carbohydrate processing.”

Rosenfeld commented that some of these involved — such as, carbohydrate processing — suggest potential changes to accommodate domestication between the tame and aggressive foxes. This falls in line with how scientists believe dogs became domesticated 10,000 years ago, growing ever closer to human populations and developing to scavenge their scraps and garbage, although in this study both tame and aggressive foxes were maintained on the same diet.

“As animals get domesticated, they have to also accommodate different diets than what they’ve been eating in the wild because now they’re getting scraps from humans,” Rosenfeld said. “They’re selecting for genes that are involved in carbohydrate process, like metabolism processing, so it’s sort of telling us when you consider domestication that we might have to think about how the animal may have to then turn on a whole set of other genes to accommodate this new diet.”

But there were other brain differences as well.

“We also found genes suppressed in tame foxes associated in inflammation processes we call interleukin signaling, cytokines production and communication between cells to each other, and this gene expression linked to whether they were tame versus aggressive.”

The researchers’ original idea that genes related to hormones like oxytocin ended up not panning out when they saw little change between tame and aggressive foxes. But, she said it was interesting that the prevalent changes they did see involved more genes down-regulated or suppressed in tame than aggressive foxes.

“Most of the genes in the hypothalamus actually we found were suppressed in tame relative to hyper aggressive foxes, you know, squashing a hyperactive response, Rosenfeld said. “So, it’s an interesting question to consider that, as dogs became more domesticated, did they become more prone to disease because they don’t have such a heightened immune response? We can’t really answer that question just yet.”

Read more about this work in the journal article “Hypothalamic transcriptome of tame and aggressive silver foxes (Vulpes vulpes) identifies gene expression differences shared across brain regions.” This research published in October 2019 in the journal Genes, Brain and Behavior.

Cheryl Rosenfeld is a principal investigator in MU’s Bond Life Sciences Center and a professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Missouri.

#IAmScience Kaitlyn Waters

January 25, 2020 By Mariah Cox in #IAmScience Tags: animal science, virology

By Mariah Cox | Bond LSC

It’s common knowledge that all Ph.D. candidates must complete research in preparation for a dissertation, but what happens when one’s faculty mentor moves to a different school before completion?

Kaitlyn Waters found herself in that situation as she was preparing for the final year of her Ph.D. program.

Waters, a current veterinary medical sciences Ph.D. candidate at Mississippi State University (MSU), is finishing her research in the Bond Life Sciences Center with primary investigator Henry Wan. Wan came to Mizzou last summer from MSU as a joint professor in the School of Medicine, the departments of Veterinary Pathobiology, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

While a handful of Wan’s Ph.D. candidates graduated before he left MSU, Kaitlyn Waters and Mandy Guan were the last of the bunch to finish their degrees.

For Waters, it was a simple decision moving 500 miles from Starkville, Mississippi, to Columbia.

“It was actually pretty easy. Like personally and especially just school-wise and finishing the research,” Waters said. “The way he presented it was that we had more opportunities here to collaborate with more departments around campus and core facilities. It was definitely an easy decision.”

After graduation, Waters has a four-year fellowship with the Foreign Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory (FADDL) that begins at Plum Island in Connecticut and transitions to the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility set to open in Manhattan, Kansas, in 2022.

“They’re opening up this new facility and they’re bringing in new scientists. They’re training us to be the, quote, unquote, ‘next group of scientists’ for that facility,” Waters said. “It’s a lot of responsibility, but it’s exciting.”

Before her move to Missouri, Waters had never lived far away from home. A Byram native, Waters only moved two-and-a-half hours away to attend MSU for her undergraduate and doctoral degrees.

“If I had done this right after finishing undergrad, I think it would have been difficult but because I’m older now, I am more comfortable being independent and relying on myself.”

While it was an important steppingstone for Waters’ post-graduation plans, she misses the football culture and food back home.

“I’m a big sports fan in general and I’ve noticed that Columbia still functions during football games, which is completely weird to me because Starkville shuts down. You can’t go anywhere near MSU’s campus on gameday without traffic being insane and people being everywhere,” Waters said.

Before Waters began the research path, she wanted to become a veterinarian, but those plans got derailed when she found out she did not get into veterinary school.

“When I didn’t get in it was kind of like, I have no backup plan,” Waters said. “Before joining Dr. Wan’s lab I had never held a pipette. I had heard about research, but I had no idea that it’s really what I wanted to do. I definitely don’t think I would be the person I am today if I had gone to veterinary school.”

From not being able to hold a pipette, Waters has come a long way since the beginning of her doctoral program. Waters’ dissertation focuses on the RNP complex, which are three polymerase proteins in the influenza genome that are responsible for the replication of viral genome and RNA. Specifically, she is looking to understand how the RNP complex efficiently and inefficiently replicate in nature to cause new viral strains.

According to Waters, her research path has given her a chance to learn and grow not only as a scientist, but also as a person that she might not have gotten back home as a veterinarian.

“If I had gotten into vet school and become a veterinarian, I would’ve stayed in Mississippi to practice as a clinician and, possibly, own my own clinic which would’ve been great. But now knowing I will have a Ph.D. in infectious diseases, I also know this path can take me anywhere in the word and I can see a lot more whereas if I’d been a veterinarian I would not be experiencing the things that I get the chance to experience now.”

At Plum Island, Waters will serve as a liaison between the computer scientists and the biologists and virologists. Her fellowship will allow her to collaborate with influential scientists and travel the world.

After the four years is up, Waters hopes to stay with the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility.

“I don’t think I can get a better research experience anywhere else in the United States. At this moment, I plan on sticking with it and staying with them, but anything could happen.”

#IAmScience Ashley Meyer

February 8, 2019 By Mariah Cox in #IAmScience Tags: animal science

Mariah Cox | Bond LSC

Situated in the Bond Life Sciences Center is an almost empty research lab on the fourth floor, which to some may look like an end but is really just a new beginning.

Inside you may find a few boxes of gloves, a stack of brightly colored test tube racks and a sole thermocycler sitting on the lab bench. You’ll also find Ashley Meyer, the first researcher hired on by Wes Warren.

“This is a brand-new lab. Dr. Warren came from Washington University in Saint Louis, and he didn’t bring anything with him so all the stuff you see here I just bought in the past two weeks,” Meyer said. “I’m still ordering things and learning all sorts of new protocols and helping to optimize systems.”

Warren hired Meyer to study genes associated with sexual dimorphism. Sexual dimorphism are differences between sexes that present themselves via behavior, physical traits and phenotypes.

“Single-cell RNA sequencing can be really beneficial for understanding diseases. Specifically, there are a lot of diseases that act differently for women and men,” Meyer said. “Women are more prone to get arthritis whereas men are more prone to get colon cancer. If we can understand what genes may be responsible and how they’re different between the sexes, it can be extremely beneficial.”

Meyer wasn’t always interested in genomic research, however. Much like her supervisor, Wes Warren, Meyer went to school in hopes of becoming a veterinarian but eventually found her passion for research.

“I originally wanted to be a vet, that’s a pretty popular answer,” Meyer said. “Once I got into animal science it was more livestock based and I realized that the vet school really wasn’t what I wanted to do and that I really enjoyed science.”

It wasn’t until after she spoke with one of her professors that she realized science and research was the path for her. Meyer completed her graduate degree in animal science focused on reproductive physiology and molecular biology at the University of Missouri.

“I studied reproduction in pigs and I loved it,” Meyer said.

For Meyer, being able to run her own lab will prepare her for her future.

“I like the idea of being able to run a lab. I think that having the opportunity to be the lab supervisor and help start this lab from scratch will benefit me to be able to run a lab pretty effectively in the future,” Meyer said. “The main reason why I took this job is because I really wanted to learn. When you’re a student, you’re narrowed into a specific field. This job is going to give me the chance to learn all sorts of things: bioinformatics, genomic research, cancer research. This job is going to give me the chance to broaden my career.”

As for the future, Meyer doesn’t foresee pursuing a Ph.D., but she has been told that there is nothing wrong with coming back. For right now, she wants a few years of experience under her belt before committing to another four to five years in school.

“I’m a big advocate for science in general and helping the general public understand science and be exposed to it,” Meyer said. “I think it’s easy for people to push it off to the side and say it’s not important when really it’s the basis for everything we have and do, especially in the medical field.”