Progress 04/01/23 to 03/31/24
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience that will benefit from this project are livestock farmers, in particular poultry farmers, as well as meat-eating consumers. In poultry farming feed can represent 60-70% of the total costs. Profit margins are very thin and therefore poultry farmers are under significant pressure to optimize the conversion of feed to meat while keeping costs low and birds healthy. Our product will improve performance by supporting lean muscle building in broilers and overall health of the birds through our probiotic platform. In addition our product will allow farmers to reduce the level of costly methionine included in their broiler diets. This will benefit farmers by improving profit margins, which will in turn benefit consumers with lowered costs of high quality lean meat. Lower costs will particularly benefit low income households where the rising costs of high quality meat are most acutely felt. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?During this project we employed asummer intern toassistwith the genetic engineering of the probiotic strain. During her employmentshe learned about and gained hands-on experience with new laboratory techniques and skills.After completing her internship with Sasya she returned to her graduate program where these learned skills helped improve her graduate research. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?
Nothing Reported
What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
During our phase I project we sought to demonstrate the proof of concept for a probiotic platform that can produce and deliver performance enhancing supplements in situ in the livestock gut. To this end we created a probiotic that produces an ergogenic supplementwith demonstrated ability to improve performance of broiler chickens. To this end we screened several enzymes that are responsible for producing thetarget supplement and introduced the top candidatesinto the probiotic platform. We thentested a variety of expression systems for these enzymes to determine which will lead to optimal production of the target product. We also made several genetic modifications to improve product output by our probiotic strain. This genetic engineering effort led to a probiotic strain that is capable of producing the ergogenic supplement when grown in the lab using only glucose as a carbon source. Looking ahead to delivering our product to livestock, we recognized the need for a biocontainment mechanism that would prevent proliferation of our probiotic strain outside the target host. To this end we designed, implemented and tested two genetic switches that are activated when the probiotic is expelled from the intestinaltract and prevent the strain from replicating further. One of our switches showed excellent growth inhibition in environmental conditions while the other still demonstrated some growth and will require more engineering, which we propose to do during our phase II award. A probiotic strain containing these biocontainment switches will serve as a platform to deliver not only the target supplement we are currently working on, but future supplements as well. During our phase I we delivered on our proposed goals and demonstrated the feasability of creating a probiotic delivery vehicle that can provide performance enhancing supplements to livestock. For our phase II we will optmize our strainfurther and develop a process where our probiotic can be produced at scale. We believe this product will provide healthy profit margins at every level of the process and will boost poultry performance, providing savings for both farmers and consumers.
Publications
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