How Genetics Shape Sheep Immunity with Dr Kelsey Bentley

What is actually occurring within a sheep with worm resistance? This week on the podcast we have a fascinating discussion with Dr Kelsey Bentley who has spent her career so far looking into the immune mechanisms of Katahdin sheep in the US. Kelsey runs us through what happens biologically within the sheep to make it ‘resistant’. She has also researched the importance of the role of colostrum in lamb immunity. Kelsey explains how it provides essential immunological benefits - particularly through IgG and IgA antibodies - and that colostrum quality varies between sheep and therefore is under genetic influence. 

Highlights:
- The make-up of the Katahdin breed
- The biology of parasite resistance
- The genetics of parasite resistance
- The effect of worm resistance on other traits like growth
- The importance of good quality colostrum 
- Behavioral responses to illnesses

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Transcript

Immune Responses and Parasite Resistance

Speaker 1 0:00

Welcome Dr Kelsey Bentley to Hedge Heavard.

Speaker 2 0:03

Thank you.

Speaker 1 0:04

Great to have you here, kelsey. So yeah, the reason we've got you along today is because your PhD topic is really interesting, and so we're keen to have a chat about that. You're the Small Remnant Extension Specialist at Kansas Tech, kansas Uni, kansas. What are we?

Speaker 2 0:18

Kansas State University.

Speaker 1 0:20

Kansas State. Sorry, I have got this written in front of me and just didn't find it, but I've moved from Virginia recently, which is where you did your PhDs, which is where we're going to chat mainly about. I mean, maybe just a bit of your background, how you ended up interested in sheep and worms.

Speaker 2 0:37

Yeah, so I was originally from North Carolina where I grew up on a club lamb operation, so really immersed in sheep and goats even from a young age, growing up through 4-H and FFA. And then I eventually figured out that I wanted to make a career out of sheep and kind of. In order to do that, realized that I had to leave the state of North Carolina so, under the mentorship of Dr Scott Roudridge, would go on to get my master's degree originally, and then I applied for a fellowship through West Virginia University and would go on to actually receive that fellowship. So that's how I ended up sticking around and getting the PhD.

Speaker 1 1:16

Yeah, cool. So, and so the club lamb operations, that's, breeding animals for that sort of show circuit. Is that what that means?

Speaker 2 1:23

Yeah, so it's just like blackface crossed influence sheep yes, for mainly shows. So that's actually how I started. And then, um, on my research is where I actually that was my first introduction to katahdin sheep and I grew to love them and realized that, man, these are really cool little critters and decided that, you know, that was kind of an avenue that I needed to explore outside of just the club lambs yeah, awesome.

Speaker 1 1:49

Yeah, most of us over this side of the world look at, look at the club lamb with uh yeah a slight smirk, but the um, yeah, cool, like maybe just explain the katahdin sheep, their sort of background and their specialities.

Speaker 2 2:04

Yeah. So, originally developed by Michael Peel out of Maine, he wanted to combine some of the traditional growth traits that we see in wool breeds like the Suffolk with some of the easy care and no shearing characteristics of breeds like the St Croix or Barbados Blackbelly and decided that, hey, I'm going to start crossbreeding these to see if we can get a really low input kind of easy care sheep and out of that ended up creating what we now know as the Katahdin. It is the fastest growing sheep here in the United States, with the most, and the way I measure that is through National Sheep Improvement Records. So from, I think, 2018 to now in 2023, they have the most lambs on record and are just by far taking over National Sheep Improvement Program in terms of registry. So something that is really popular here in the states and that we really like to see grow.

Speaker 1 3:04

Cool. So they are used as a maternal breed or terminal breed or both Mainly maternal.

Speaker 2 3:10

I think that they actually do get docked somewhat here in the States when it comes to, you know, having the tail and being a traditional hair breed. It just kind of depends on where your market is. Some more ethnic markets actually prefer the Katahdin, whereas a lot of the more terminal markets will maybe try to shy away from them. But you're seeing more of the Katahdin kind of push its way into traditional kind of sheep enterprises within the estates.

Speaker 1 3:39

Yeah, cool. So they're obviously sort of had performance at their core since inception. So obviously lots of work done and one of their strengths is their resistance to worms. That's sort of been built into the breed from day one, or is that sort of.

Speaker 2 3:55

Sort of kind of. So you have to think of the Katahdin. They get the reputation for being parasite resistant. However, we have to remember that I talked about two breeds kind of on the spectrum of parasite resistance. So you have the Suffolk breed, who in the United States is known to be parasite susceptible, so they're not very good at combating that parasitic infection. But then you also have breeds like the St Croix and Barbados that we know grew up in environments that forced them to be better in terms of their parasite resilience.

Speaker 2 4:27

So the Katahdin actually has a lot of different breeds of resistance and susceptibility nested within them. So it's very important that we don't just go along and tout the Katahdin as being parasite resistant in general, and that's why it's important that we start to measure traits like that so that we can select for Katahdins that are more parasite resistant. Now producers in the States have actively been selecting for the Katahdin to be more resistant to parasites. So if you had to ask me if you would say that the Katahdin is a parasite resistant breed, I would say that thanks to the producers in the States, we do now have a Katahdin that is more parasite resistant than I would say they are susceptible. However, there still are Katahdins out in the States that are still susceptible to that parasitic infection.

Speaker 1 5:16

Cool, good answer. We never get away from the bell curve. In genetics there's always variation. Yeah, so that's excellent. Um, we're big fans of resistance to parasites, which is why we're why we're chatting, and I guess the ability to breed an animal that requires less flavor and less chemicals to to stay healthy and happy and productive I guess most of us, including me, I don't understand that well is like the mechanism of resistance to parasites. What's going on in an animal when it manages to reduce the worm population within itself and then within the population? What are the mechanisms that it can use to cut down parasitism?

Speaker 2 5:57

Yeah, so there is so many.

Speaker 2 5:59

You can think of it as almost twofold.

Speaker 2 6:01

So there's an initial cascade which is going to be mainly like cellular based, so those are going to be things like neutrophils that are going to put out extracellular traps and kind of bind up the parasite and prevent it from moving or growing or reproducing, and then the body naturally kind of sweeps that parasite out and it subsequently dies.

Speaker 2 6:28

So you can think of that as more of a cellular-based immunity. But then there's also humoral-based immunity, in which that individual can go out and actually tag the parasitic antigen with antibody and state, hey, we figured out that this is foreign and that antibody kind of does the same, similar mechanisms of entrapment, and then subsequent sweeping of that immune responses. There's lots of different immune cascades. There's cytokines like IL-13 that have this weep and sweep response where when parasitic antigen kind of interrupts the endothelium or kind of irritates it, il-13 can be produced and then we get lots of mucus production and then the sweeping of those parasites out of the immune system and what you would kind of see is diarrhea. But it works kind of twofold as a means of us as producers don't like to see the diarrhea, however, naturally that's that individual trying to get rid of the infection.

Speaker 1 7:23

Yeah, cool. So it's that mechanism that ends up sometimes where you see a positive correlation between worm resistance and what we call DAG, which is diarrhea or how we score as DAG anyway. So that mechanism is why we sometimes see that correlation, whereas others and we have been actively breeding against that correlation to try and get animals that are resistant to worms and don't scour, which is kind of the holy grail for us. Yeah, interesting stuff If we get into I guess your PhD was around what's going on in the immune response and in all sorts of detail.

Speaker 1 7:57

I guess the interesting stuff is and we're seeing it kind of loosely and really keen to understand it more is, as we select for worm resistance we get kind of a bit more general. I don't know. We seem to get a better immune system somehow and we're seeing that in foot rot a little bit. So there's a favourable correlation between resistance to foot rot and resistance to worms a little bit in the work we did in New Zealand and we're also starting to see well, catherine McRae has shown it there is a favourable correlation with pneumonia in New Zealand and we're sort of starting to see that a little bit in our work where some sires have just seemed to be healthier progeny. Talk to us about what's going on there.

Speaker 2 8:37

Yeah, so I'll tell you kind of how we stumbled upon it through my master's program. So it was actually work predicated by Dr Andrew Weaver, who is now currently at NC State University, and what he found was that lambs out of low PFEC, so that's going to be post weaning fecal egg count, so that's an EBV that we generate from NSIP. So sheep that were incredibly negative in terms of that value or, excuse me, sheep that were sired by a negative RAM meaning that you should have parasite resistant had lower percentage of death loss at this one particular research facility that we were looking at in kind of that Southeast Virginia. And it was interesting though, because that timing of death loss was right around weaning, so it was from day seven, so it was non-neonatal death loss.

Speaker 2 9:31

So it was from day seven to right around weaning and sheep would have not experienced a pasture-based infection yet. So it kind of got us wondering what exactly was causing this really high death loss this particular year. And it was actually found to be Clostridium perfringes type A. So the CDNT vaccine covers the traditional C and D with a tetanus toxoid. However, that type A isn't really included. So they had a particular rainy season at this unit.

Speaker 2 10:01

Then there was an outbreak of class A and what happened was parasite resistant sheep died less from the class A. So that got us, you know, saying like wait a minute, that's, that's non parasitic in nature, that's actually a bacteria. So how are these sheep managing to overcome that kind of dirty environment with the class A? And so I started looking at response to CDNT vaccine in those lambs and saying, okay, well, let's measure their response to vaccination and kind of see what that looks like. So what we found was that parasite resistant lambs who had that incredibly negative post-sweening fecal egg count EBV, responded to initial vaccine in this kind of small manner. It was rather minor. However, upon booster vaccination they had this huge amnestic surge of antibody which meant that those individuals immediately recognized that CDNT vaccine upon booster and generated lots of antibody to it.

Speaker 2 11:05

Now let's talk about the problem. So the parasite-susceptible sheep, or those that were incredibly positive in terms of their post-weaning fecal egg count, ebv, did not respond to initial vaccination. So that line from initial vaccination to when the booster would occur was relatively flat, meaning that those individuals never really took in that antigen and processed it. So therefore, whenever they were boosted they couldn't nearly have the level of protective antibody needed, indicating that maybe these individuals might have actually required a third booster to get to the protective level of antibody needed. So it kind of just that was our down and dirty way of measuring those individuals' ability to respond to what we knew that they were dying from, and we found that the parasite resistant lambs were much better equipped to respond to the CDNT vaccination as opposed to the parasite susceptible counterpart.

Speaker 1 12:07

That's really cool, isn't it? Like it's so awesome, so infrequent in science where you stumble across really cool things like that, so you must have been pretty pumped when you got to do a PhD in that area.

Speaker 2 12:20

Oh yeah, we were stoked. It was one of those things where, when we saw the differences in terms of death loss, we kind of suspected, however, it needed to be taken that step further and so, yeah, that was my initial master's project, and what a great master's project to have.

Speaker 1 12:35

Yeah, yeah cool. Is there any reason and I'm thinking the answer is no, but I should ask the question that that is Katahdin specific, like obviously your work's been in Katahdin, but is there any reason why that would be the case?

Speaker 2 12:47

Yeah, I get that question so much and it's tricky. Right now we can't say it in breeds much outside of the Katahdin. It's relatively confined, just because my whole entire dissertation did nothing but focus on Katahdin sheep. But the main purpose behind that is because we have such a beautiful breeding scheme set up where we have parasite resistant and susceptible individuals all within the same breed. So that's why the most exploration has been done there. However, we are now that I'm at Kansas State University I'm going to try to explore that in breeds outside of the Katahdin, mainly starting with the polypay. We're going to try to set up a similar system here where we have parasite resistant and susceptible polypays and see what occurs within that breed.

Speaker 1 13:40

Yeah, excellent, that'll be the thing to watch closely. Was it you or a colleague that did the work into colostrum?

Speaker 2 13:50

It was also me yeah.

Speaker 1 13:52

Let's talk about that.

Speaker 2 13:54

Yeah, I'll puff out my chest a little bit about the Colostrum. That was actually my brainchild. So kind of the transition from your master's to your PhD. Your master's you're kind of set up for success. They want to give you something that they think will be, and I was. You know it was like, wow, what a great. But then the PhD, you know, my my boss kind of sat back and said you know, now it's time for you to start to think about some things that are. You know, how are you going to contribute to the industry? And so with that death loss, that initial death loss, my kind of take on it was that I thought that you know, they were giving Sire a lot of credit for the influence of that. But I was like, but what about, like Dam, let's take a step back and think about what Dam could be providing in that mating and a lot of that early initial death loss I thought could actually be contributing to the influence of colostrum. What is dam passing through colostrum that's allowing those sheep to better able to survive, and that kind of you know, once again just snowballed into something that I couldn't have even imagined.

Speaker 2 15:04

But where we started was we said, okay, we're going to take 20 of the susceptible use, 20 of the resistant use and we're just going to take colostrum samples on them and we're going to do a colostrum sample.

Speaker 2 15:19

But then we also wanted to see, like the impact of antibody across lactation. So we decided to do a 30 day sample and then also a 60 day sample, to do a 30-day sample and then also a 60-day sample. So we called one an initial kind of a colostrum sample. Then we also had a mid-lactation and a late lactation sample and what we found was that in that initial colostrum sample there were massive differences in terms of antibody and we were almost shocked. I went back and actually did the assay again in a previous year just to make sure, and so now what we can say is that at this particular unit, when we look at colostrum, there is a two and a half fold difference in terms of IgG between parasite resistant and parasite susceptible individuals. So not only was the lamb's ability to respond to that CDNT vaccination playing into the death loss, but the ewe or dam was also having a huge influence on that lamb's ability to be able to survive in a dirty environment or an environment that was rich with pathogen load.

Speaker 1 16:29

I mean simply put, I guess if yeah, if you had a past on I mean essentially more of its immunity, so that first vaccination is actually a booster to a lamb that's already had some antibodies passed from mom. Is that how that works?

Speaker 2 16:43

Exactly so mom is able. And the great thing about mom kind of passively providing that immunity is that, if you know, she's in the environment that we are going to now dump lamb into. So lamb goes from totally sterile environment to now dirty environment. So her cells will go out and they will sample little pieces of pathogens that she will have encountered throughout her lifespan and they'll hold on to them we call them B cells or plasma cells, and they'll kind of she'll remember what that pathogen looks like and then she'll generate antibody to that pathogen. Well, the great thing about colostrum is that is what lamb is getting. So lamb is getting kind of this repertoire of antibody that mom has experienced and those you know. Having more of that antibody means that you are better equipped to handle those pathogens. So mom is just giving lamb all of her immunological memory by that initial colostrum. That's why you know, when you hear all colostrum is an important, it is. It's very important from a nutritional sense, being that it's complete nutrition for lamb.

Speaker 2 17:54

However, people often kind of glaze over or don't think about the immunological consequences of colostrum, and I think that by lamb ingesting those antibodies there is so much programming that goes on that we haven't even began to scrape the surface of so just thinking about lifetime productivity and how that individual is going to be throughout their entire life. Do parasite resistant sheep? Are they early maturing? Do you know? Ewes have more days of it. Just it's such a interesting kind of thing to think about, but I think all we can say for right now is that those sheep have a better start in life it is super interesting like this, possibly my favorite science day ever, the um it's.

Speaker 1 18:41

It's such a cool area that we've just, as you've said, is sort of sitting relatively untapped, those that we've sort of blindly bred for resistance for one purpose, but if we're accidentally getting all sorts of other cool stuff again, there's not many free lunches in this game, so when you get one, you've got to run with it. The IgG, which is a word I can't say, immunoglobulin, something or other talks to us about. Yeah, so that's the increased count. So that's essentially the parcel of immunity, is it?

Speaker 2 19:10

Yes, so IgG is a highly specific form of antibody. So there's all sorts of antibody. There's IgM, which is like this big pentamer that just kind of grabs things and says hey, I'm big, so just come find me. There's IgA, which is a little bit more of a mucosal secretion. So we also looked at IgA within those early samples and found some differences in IgA as well. So think of saliva or mucus or even colostrum. But then IgG is very, very specific to either colostrum or serum. It's highly abundant, especially to very particular pathogens. It's highly abundant, especially to very particular pathogens. So it's kind of the most specific form of antibody that we could find to say, ok, you know, when we're measuring immune response, we didn't really want to go with IgM. That's just kind of a surveilling antibody. And then IgA2 is just a little bit. It's too broad, there's not kind of enough specificity there. But IgG would be the highly specific form of antibody that we could measure.

Speaker 1 20:17

So in a production system where we're often vaccinating for, as you say, the user in the production environment, in the dirty environment, but also we obviously pre-LAM vaccinate for clostridial, and so what should happen, or what you've seen happen in Katahdin, is that those worm-resistant ewes mount a bigger response. They'll also then pass on more of that vaccine, or that immunity from the vaccine to LAM.

Speaker 2 20:42

Yeah, exactly so they just have more antibody in general. So not only do lambs die less, they respond better to vaccination, and then they also have more IgG within their colostrum.

Speaker 1 20:57

So good, I'm feeling like there's got to be a but here somewhere. Is there any downsides of this? Is there any sort of any outcome that? We don't want.

Speaker 2 21:08

So Dr Nodder at the University of Virginia. He's emeritus now. However, he did put out some data that would say that maybe selection for immune response is not necessarily conducive of growth. So it's kind of we think of it as a resource pie. So if you have this big pie and you take up a larger piece of that pie in resources devoting towards antibody production, which is a protein, then that individual may be less likely to experience better traditional growth traits. However, my data and I actually had to present my data in front of him and it was kind of terrifying.

Speaker 1 21:54

But my data says that he's a nice guy. He's not that terrifying.

Speaker 2 21:59

No, he's not. Just because we have selected for one, we don't necessarily impact the other, and and that was on a very small scale. But that does need to be done, just to make sure that when we are selecting for immune traits, we're also selecting for well-rounded individuals that are in fact, you know, just going to. But I think that's actually a part of the fault of the Suffolk is they never actually able to shift from traditional growth to mount an immune response? They just can't physically do that, and so, therefore, they never mount the immune response and they die. So, yeah, it's still important to have both. I'm not saying that we just need a single trait select for immune response. However, we need to keep that in mind too whenever we start selecting for individuals. We can't just solely select on growth or maternal traits.

Speaker 1 22:52

Yeah, and I think that's the job of animal breeders is to work with correlations and bring it all together rather than one or the other. And I think the I mean there is work that Joanne Grief and John Carlson have done in Western Australia where they kind of separate the. There is a growth penalty when you run them with susceptible sheep. But when you separate them out and they run together and they kind of have that opportunity to control the worm population, then they actually don't need to mount their immune response because they're kind of getting rewarded for their, for their effort in of their immune system. So like the growth penalty then goes away if you run them. Yeah, uh, and with them with like, like, with like I suppose. So that's yeah, I think there's probably.

Speaker 2 23:34

Yeah, I mean that makes sense in a resource allocation sort of um theory anyway yeah, exactly, and and then just one more thing that we didn't touch on, that was in my dissertation.

Speaker 2 23:46

We then went back and said, okay, let us look and see when we do challenge these individuals with an immune response. We wanted to see behaviorally how they responded because, when you think about it, sheep that appear more sick are more likely to receive a treatment. So we were like, well, let's just look at these and very interesting things in terms of behavior as well. Those parasite resistant sheep are far less likely to have a duration and severity of sick behaviors. When we give them lipopolysaccharide, which is just a bacterial agent that kind of makes them feel really physiologically ill, they're able to bounce back from that not only quicker but they also show less severity of sheep grimace score. So for people who want to kind of see the full picture, not only do we know that all of these sheep are healthier from an antibody sense, but when those sheep do eventually become sick, they're less likely to receive that treatment because they appear less sick all right, this is so cool.

Sheep Health and Immune Responses

Speaker 1 24:53

The um, so what's? Yeah, well, I guess that's where we're at. So the, the lamb mortality I think one of your. So the lamb mortality is it's post, I guess, towards the end of it's not a, it's not neonatal mortality. It's kind of somewhere in that pre-weaning phase, but it's, it's not not. They're better at getting up and surviving under a cold stress.

Speaker 2 25:14

It's obviously more of a pathogen related survival yeah, it's definitely a pathogen related survival because, like I said, we we track that survival number, uh, at that particular unit across multiple years and that that one particular year that I was talking about where death loss rose to like 40%, um, that was atypical, and then, of course, it would turn to more of a normal level and there were no differences between the sheep whenever we they weren't challenged with that dirty environment as I like to say yeah, and I think that's kind of what we're trying to set ourselves up for.

Speaker 1 25:48

I mean, there's years where things happen like it could be a wet summer in australia, new zealand, where all of a sudden you've got a whole heap of yeah, pressures on that you're not used to, or a really cold winter or whatever like this. I guess we need to set the shape up that like every shape can go well in a perfect environment, but it's the it's when things don't go well that all of a sudden you're in, you're in a lot of pain and there's and for things like that there's no treatment, often, like you, just it's selection of the fittest in a really expensive way yeah, exactly, and I feel like there's some producers out there that just think, oh, this is the way it has to be, I'm just going to have sheep that die.

Speaker 2 26:27

And my research would kind of tell you that maybe if we start selecting for that post-weaning fecal leg count, ebv, you're actually getting health traits along for the ride with that. It's not just selection for parasites, it is selection for when you have those bad years and you do have a class A outbreak or you have incidents of pneumonia within your barn. My research would start to tiptoe that line of. I think it's when we select for parasite resistance, we're getting individuals that are in fact healthier to a variety of pathogens, whether it be parasitic bacteria or viral in nature yeah, which is interesting across parasites.

Speaker 1 27:07

I don't know the us very well at all, so where we have some areas which are more ostetagia source, stomach scour worms and then some barbers pole areas is what was what's typical. What typical parasites are you dealing?

Speaker 2 27:22

with. Yeah, typical within the united states, definitely from an economical sense, are homunculus. That that's definitely what we're going to be mainly focusing on and dealing with. That's not saying we don't have any of the ostratesia around here.

Speaker 1 27:35

Uh, it's just not as predominant yeah, okay, I don't know, you got the nastiest ones. That's handy. Yeah, cool, the what's this? I guess what's next in terms of given? Obviously got to keep now you have to keep a job and you have other stuff to do, but what would be your sort of research projects going forward if um given given funding and given the opportunities?

Speaker 2 27:58

yeah, so, uh. So right now, currently I just put in a proposal actually I'm hoping to start to. So I talked about that response to CD&T vaccination. I feel like that's such a good starting point for us to look at antibody in breeds outside of the Katahdin so we know what the Katahdin does in response to that CDNT. So now I put in a proposal for Rambouillet, polypay, targi, dorpers just to get in some samples from different producers and start to look at IgG levels right following initial vaccination and then also following booster vaccination, to see if we can't kind of then look back into NSIP and kind of post hoc say, okay, well, individuals within these breeds also have better response to vaccination. And then also the colostrum I mean, as I spoke about previously. I have just scratched the surface of colostrum. I think it is a biological masterpiece that I pretty much plan to spend the rest of my career focusing on and seeing if we can start to parse apart some of the biological underpinnings that are going on in colostrum consumption.

Speaker 1 29:17

Cool. Well, that's awesome. We can watch it for the next 30 years providing some great research, maybe longer. Awesome, the CDNT, I'm assuming that's kind of like our 5-in-1. That's clostridial. Is that a combination of clostridial?

Speaker 2 29:33

Yeah, Like I said, it's the clostridium perfringes, type C and D and then also a tetanus toxoid. So it's just a really basic vaccine that's given over here in the States, and so it kind of gives me a good starting point of it's, something that producers already implement, and then I can on the back end do research from that.

Speaker 1 29:52

Yeah, yeah, cool. What's the? I mean the lab costs for testing. Is that prohibitive or not too bad?

Speaker 2 29:58

It's not too bad at all. I make all the plates in-house. So prohibitive or not too bad, it's not too bad at all, I make all the plates in-house. So me and dr baldridge actually kind of uh, we made that plate so specific and it's like um, I I tell people like when you first started doing it it seemed like I was trying to reinvent the wheel, but now that I've done it so much, uh, plate is super cheap, uh, really inexpensive. And that because that's the first thing producers, you, you know, when I want serum samples from them, they're like oh well, what's it's going to cost me.

Speaker 2 30:26

And the plate itself really isn't expensive at all. I think when we calculated it up it was maybe $1.25 per plate. But when I say per plate, there is, I think there's 48 samples that can go on that plate. So, yeah, producers can get a lot of really good knowledge. And two, it helps that I am just now starting up in terms of my career, so I'm able to maybe offload some of that cost on the producer and state it as a research purpose stated as a research purpose. But I eventually hope to maybe start to see some of that cost actually go towards implementation into NSIP, like I, want us to have reported IGG values within the National Sheep Improvement Program. I'm sure that's so so far down the road, but certainly within my career that's something that I would like to see implemented as a really good way for us to start to select for healthier sheep cool and so it's just blood serum at the e and a.

Speaker 1 31:30

Like you just spin down blood, take serum and no, you're not splitting it, you gotta wait it you gotta coagulate it and take serum, do you?

Speaker 2 31:36

yeah, it's as simple as that. It's just a serum test. Nothing, because the the colostrum. I will say when, when a producer kind of comes to me and says well, I want to do some colostrum stuff, the colostrum is harder, you have to. There's a lot of fat and you have to dial it out and it becomes a whole nightmare.

Speaker 2 31:53

But no, yeah, the serum it's mainly just just training someone to draw blood, because I feel like that's not a super common practice among most producers. But if they're close enough I'll go to them draw the blood, spin it down here at K-State and then have some results back for them.

Speaker 1 32:12

Yeah, cool, very, very interesting, and and so the result is obviously a linear result, or is it sort of a? So you get a, I don't know a number from from one to a thousand or something, or what's the. What's the scale you get the results in yeah, so it's uh nanograms per ml.

Speaker 2 32:31

So I think we found like individuals and like I said, I'm um, it's all relative to the katahdin, so it's super hard because I don't want to throw out like a oh yeah, you get this amount of igg and you have a really good, because who knows, like maybe that's only relevant for the katahdin, maybe another breed has a different igg value.

Sheep Health and Breakthrough Research

Speaker 1 32:53

It just all depends oh yeah, cool, so interesting, kelsey. It literally has been my favorite conversation for a long, long time time to learn more about that. So, yeah, really appreciate your time today. I better let you go and do some work, or you're probably. I don't know where are we. You're probably knocking off for the day, are you? Yeah, about two, it's four o'clock.

Speaker 2 33:12

I've still got probably a good hour's worth of work, and then I'll head home for the day.

Speaker 1 33:17

Yeah, excellent, that's been fascinating and congratulations on some breakthroughs and a great thesis. And, yeah, really looking forward to watching that career and, yeah, my mind will be racing for the rest of the day, so expect an email before the day's out, I'd imagine.

Speaker 2 33:34

Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it. It's always great whenever you get to talk about your work.

Speaker 1 33:39

Yeah, excellent, brilliant, thank you. Thanks again to Heinegger, who are proud world leaders in the manufacturing and supply of professional sheep shearing and clipping equipment. Thank you to MNSD Animal Health and Norflex Livestock Intelligence. They offer an extensive livestock product portfolio focused on animal health management, all backed up by exceptional service. We thank both of these companies for their ongoing support of the Head Shippen podcast.