OSU research has potential to save cattle industry millions
STILLWATER, Okla. – Oklahoma State University molecular biologists recently received a grant worth nearly $500,000 from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture for research that has the potential of saving the cattle industry millions of dollars.
Bovine respiratory disease (BRD) costs the beef industry $540 million in direct costs and $5 billion in indirect costs each year. The viral disease can be caused when bovine herpesvirus 1 (BoHV1) infects the upper respiratory tract in cattle.
Previous studies have shown the BoHV-1 virus and modified live vaccines are a significant cause of abortions in cattle, according to Clint Jones, molecular viral pathobiologist and Sitlington Professor of Infectious Diseases with the OSU Department of Veterinary Pathobiology. He added that a synthetic drug called corticosteroid dexamethasone (DEX) also reactivates BoHV-1 and perhaps BRD.
Research has also shown that BRD is transmitted when the disease is going into its latency cycle. Scientists discovered that a pathway controlling BRD cellular reactions exists in calves infected with the disease compared to non-infected calves.
Peter Hoyt, OSU Ag Research professor and director of the OSU Center for Genomics and Proteomics, will be working with nucleic acids present in living cells (RNA) to understand how this pathway works and why additional newly discovered pathways are more active in cattle cells during the latency period of the viral disease. The project will
include extensive analyses of how the virus genes and proteins are acting during latency and when induced out of latency and how a cow’s neurons are simultaneously responding to the BRD virus within them.
Jones and Hoyt hypothesize that a life-long, dormant infection is actively maintained by the latent virus, which controls a specialized survival mechanism for neurons in cattle. See OSU, Page 3