Photograph by Kevin Clifford
Injecting Hope - Curing Ham
by Clarissa León
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story contains graphic material that may be unsuitable for some readers. However, it was necessary to include this content to maintain the story's truth and accuracy.
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VideoDr. Wansheng Liu, associate professor of animal biotechnology at UNR, is trying to uncover the genetic marker for male infertility in bulls. A question by animal science graduate student and worker Brian Santistevan is: What yields the most omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids in cattle? Grain or grass? A portion of the farm's sheep are also being used for stem cell research. All 35 pigs on the farm were born with melanoma but were able to cure themselves due to an unknown curing agent in their bodies.
Room 104 in the Fleischmann Agriculture Building at UNR is home to another small laboratory. It's also a second home to animal science graduate student, Michelle Coker. The lab is fitted with the usual: microscopes, computers, petri dishes and needles. A refrigerator contains cow blood samples and the freezer contains cow serum, which Coker uses in her research.
"I came here because my dad decided to start a ranch, a Hereford ranch, and I decided I wanted to study to help him," Coker said.
Before studying animal science, she graduated with a degree in conservation biology or wildlife biology, Coker said. Today, she divides her time between the Main Station Farm and the labs in the FA building. At the farm she feeds cows, cleans pens and does any work that Joos assigns. At the labs in the FA building she studies animals, mainly cows.
Every Monday, Coker retrieves data for her two-year graduate research project where she hopes to find a method for detecting Epizootic Bovine Abortion.
EBA is a fetus killer in cows that isn't apparent until the time of the calf's birth, at which point the calf will already have been aborted.
"If you had all these cows out on the pasture you wouldn't notice," Coker said.
EBA is "the primary diagnosed cause of abortion in beef cattle in California and is estimated to be responsible for the loss of 45,000 to 90,000 beef calves annually," according to the Journal of Clinical Microbiology.
Coker and her colleagues have been collecting data and hope to find a way for farmers to detect pregnant cows with EBA.
"Mike pretty much had an idea of what he wanted to do," Coker said about her mentor. "Then he said we need to do this."
Coker rushed her samples to the lab every Monday.
"All of it's time sensitive," Coker said.
The root of the problem with EBA is the vector tick called Ornithodoros Coriaceus, which is about half the size of a dime and looks like a small, dirty pebble.
When the tick bites the pregnant cow during the first trimester, the virus can cause the cow to abort her fetus. Once having had EBA, the cow is immune from it.
At the farm, Coker took a needle and removed 15 to 20 ccs of blood from the carteroid arteries of her project cows.
From the blood, Coker counted the number of white blood cells and then used a refractometer, will count the serum's protein levels, and then calculate the hematocrit, or the "percent of whole blood that is composed of red blood cells."
Counts and tests later, Coker can finally begin inputting her data into her computer.
She has 10 graphs for everything from the hematocrit to the immunoglobulin to graphing neutrophil to lymphocytes, which are different types of white blood cells in the body.
"It's just a matter of taking this data and plotting it over time," Coker said.
For Coker's project, some of the cows have EBA and others do not.
With a negative EBA group, Coker hopes to see a pattern from any of the tests she has run.
It has been about four months since she began to collect the blood and six months since she began working on the project.
To date, there have been no signs from the data that point to any unusual patterns.
She won't finish collecting her data until December, she said, and thus can't be sure of anything so far.
In the end, if she and her colleagues made any discoveries at all it would first mean that she could graduate and second, a time for celebration.
"I would be really happy," she said. "It'll always be more exciting."
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