Elle Working in Lab on Hair Cortisol

Author: Elle Johnston | Major: Animal Science | Semester: Spring 2024

My name is Elle Johnston and I am part of the Bumpers College of Animal Science. My major is in Animal Science and my minor is in Poultry Science. My mentor is Dr. Shawna Weimer who is part of the Poultry Science department. Currently, I am in the second semester (Spring) of my research and am currently analyzing my data to see if there are any trends. Stress in beef cattle can cause issues including an impaired immune system, decreased welfare, and greater disease susceptibility. In this research project, FerAppease, an FDA approved synthetic analogue of Maternal Bovine Appeasing Substance, was tested on stocker beef cattle. Stocker cattle purchased at auction can be more susceptible to disease due to the stressors of transportation and handling during the auction process. These cattle are labeled “high-risk” due to their decreased immune system during this transportation process and therefore their higher risk for disease contraction. FerAppease has reduced stress in dairy cattle, but limited research exists on its effects in beef cattle. So, the purpose of this research is to determine if this drug is effective in reducing stress in cattle.

When choosing this topic I knew that I wanted to focus on animal welfare. My mentor, Dr. Shawna Weimer is the director for the Center for Food Animal Wellbeing where she along with her team research new innovations in animal wellbeing. I have been working for Dr. Weimer as a research technician since the fall of 2022 so I knew that she would be a perfect mentor for this project. This project was presented to me by Dr. Kegley and Dr. Powell who already had the idea to test the effectiveness of this drug. I have never worked with cattle before so I was excited at the idea of this project. My mentor has been so helpful during this process and has supported me throughout this entire project. Together, we have tackled most of the data as well as running the statistics for the body weight, exit chute velocity, average daily gain data. I have received a lot of help on this project by Dr. Weimer, Dr. Kegley, Dr. Powell, Robin Cheek, Doug Galloway, Jana Reynolds and Chantel Pennicott. These professors and students were extremely supportive during this entire project and were one of the main reasons that this project has been such a success.

I have learned a lot of new things during this research process. In order to fully understand the background of this project, I had to do a lot of research on cattle welfare and behavior. For one, Bovine Respiratory Disorder is a fatal disease in cattle that is primarily caused by stress.Throughout this research process I learned a lot about cattle diseases, what causes them, and how anti-stress drugs like FerAppease could positively impact cattle welfare. Similarly, this semester I was able to run hair cortisol and blood haptoglobin so I was able to learn a lot of new lab techniques and practices. I learned how to run ELISA assays as well as complete all the preparation steps for the samples. This was a very tedious learning process, however, I was successful in running these samples as well as working as a team in the lab. Some challenges we faced during this semester were mostly with the lab work. The vacuums in the animal science lab were broken so we were forced to transport all the lab materials back and forth to the poultry science lab. This was also a very tedious process but we came up with a system for transporting the samples and we made it successful. .

While I did not travel to a national conference during the semester, I was able to present my research at the undergraduate research conference this spring. I placed 3rd in the “Health” category and was able to practice presenting my research to various professors and other students. In July I will be traveling to Calgary to present at the national American Society for Animal Science conference. My abstract has been accepted and I will be presenting the same data along with the haptoglobin data. For the rest of my project, all that’s left is to run the statistics for the haptoglobin, hair cortisol, and hobo accelerometer data. I have yet to go through the vocalization data, however that is the last sampling left to analyze. Once I have all the data, I can complete the conclusions and results section for my research paper and defend my thesis.