The little things living in a calf’s nose could be key to combating bovine respiratory disease, the single most costly illness affecting the beef industry.
Jiangchao Zhao, associate professor of animal science at the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station and in the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences, uses next-generation sequencing to identify the microorganisms populating the bovine nasal cavities, known as the respiratory microbiome. He has correlated those results with the presence or absence of bovine respiratory disease, also known as BRD, in calves to…
