I’m pleased to announce that a paper that I contributed to was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Animal Science!

“Feed efficiency phenotypes in lambs involve changes in ruminal, colonic, and small intestine-located microbiota”, Katheryn Perea; Katharine Perz; Sarah Olivo; Andrew Williams; Medora Lachman; Suzanne Ishaq; Jennifer Thomson; Carl Yeoman (article here).

Katheryn is an undergraduate at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology who received an INBRE grant to support her as a visiting researcher at Montana State University in Bozeman, MT over summer 2016.  Here, she worked with Drs. Carl Yeoman and Jennifer Thomson to perform the diversity analysis on the bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract of sheep from a previous study.  These sheep had been designated as efficient or inefficient, based on how much feed was needed for them to grow.  Efficient sheep were able to grow more with less feed, and it was thought this might be due to hosting different symbiotic bacteria which were better at fermenting fibrous plant material into usable byproducts for the sheep.

Samples from the sheep were collected as part of a larger study on feed efficiency performed by MSU graduate students Kate Perz and Medora Lachman, as well as technicians Sarah Olivo and Andrew Williams, and Katheryn performed the data and statistical analysis using some of my guidelines.  This is Katheryn’s first published article, and one I just presented a poster on at the Congress on Gastrointestinal Function in Chicago, IL!