University of Arkansas department of animal science graduate student Jianmin Chai has been awarded a grant from the university's Office of Research & Innovation and Graduate Professional Student Research Council to investigate the respiratory microbiome of beef cattle and the influences on bovine respiratory disease (BRD) using next-generation sequencing.

Chai, who will team up with faculty member Jiangchao Zhao with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, aims to characterize the nasal microbiome from pre-BRD and BRD cattle as well as their healthy controls using a MinION nanopore sequencing platform, an announcement from the university said.

Nanopore sequencing is a cost-effective way to profile bacterial communities and simultaneously detect DNA and RNA virus species, since the MinION is small, portable and runs on a laptop, the announcement said.

This design will work to better understand the longitudinal shifts of the respiratory microbiome in healthy and BRD cattle after entering the feedlot and to cross-sectionally compare the microbiome community between healthy and BRD-afflicted cattle, the university said.