ChangeMAKErs - Dr. Hooman Derakhshani

Welcome to ChangeMAKErs, a new MAKEManitoba podcast series highlighting research and innovation powered by members of the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences.

In this episode, host Peter Frohlich, research development coordinator with the National Centre for Livestock and the Environment (NCLE) talks with Dr.  Hooman Derakhshani, Assistant Professor, Department of Animal Science. Learn about Hooman's journey into microbiome science and how he is exploring the power of beneficial microbes to improve animal health, reduce reliance on antibiotics, and make food production more sustainable.

Transcript

Intro 0:00

The way we grow and produce food is ever-changing, shaped by consumers and the climate in which we live and farm. Research at all points of our food system is essential for continuously improving food's journey from farm to table. The Manitoba Agriculture and Food Knowledge Exchange explores timely research innovations and applications that make our food system better than ever. Join us for today's podcast.

Peter Froelich 0:27

Hello and welcome to ChangeMAKErs, a Manitoba Agriculture and Food Knowledge Exchange podcast series. My name is Peter Froelich. I am the Research Development Coordinator for the National Center for Livestock and the Environment at the University of Manitoba. In each episode, we chat with an academic member of the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences at the university to find out about the research they're working on and how this research is shaping agriculture and food production in Manitoba and beyond. We also get to know the researchers and get to know the person behind these discoveries. Today, I am joined by Dr. Hooman Derakhshani, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Animal Science at the University of Manitoba. Thank you for joining us, Hooman.

Hooman Derakhshani 1:06

It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me, Peter.

Peter Froelich 1:07

So, Hooman, before we get into the details about your research, can you please let us know why you decided to become a researcher and a professor and why you got interested in your field of research?

Hooman Derakhshani 1:17

That's an interesting question. You know, my career journey has been really long and strange, kind of, because when I was growing up, I was, you know, I never imagined I'm going to become a professor or a researcher. When I was in my high schools or even later in the undergrads, I never imagined I'm becoming a university professor. I grew up on a family dairy farm back in my home country in Iran. My dad had like 300 lactating dairy herds. That was where I grew up. And when you grow up with these animals, you grow the passion, the love to care for these animals. Like many of the students here in our pre-vet classes at the So that's the passion, the love for the animals that pushes you to go to the weather school. So that's what I did. I went to the weather school. And then after graduating, I started working in our family farm for a few years, just involving day-to-day management, taking care of the animals and all those things. But, you know, life brings us a lot of surprises for you. That's right. The recession hit our country. The economy kind of collapsed. We couldn't maintain the farm anymore. So I moved on. I started a new kind of career again. Back in Iran for like two years, I did a meat inspection role as a veterinarian. But that was not keeping me happy. I mean, that was not my mission in life kind of thing. So at the time, I talked to my wife. She's also a veterinarian. We were classmates back in veter school. And we decided to, let's go explore the world. There might be better things for all out there. So, I mean, we decided to try different countries. And the easiest way to do that is usually to graduate studies in other countries. I started to get a few options. I explored a few universities in the U. I remember I applied for UC Davis. I got admission from UC Davis in California. I applied for University of Guelph here in Canada. And this goes back to, I think, 2009 or 2010, something like that. And then I also applied for a master in animal science in Australia, in University of Queensland. And I got admission. Between these three, I decided to go to Australia, give it a shot. I went there. I did a master's for like one and a half year. And my major was again in animal science, human microbiology. Interestingly, one of the professors over there. I mean, he liked me and he told me that you're becoming a good researcher. You need to go to one of the labs in Canada. They're doing great things related to rumen microbiology, which is kind of very linked to my current research area. And he told me, just contact those labs. And that lab happened to be here at the University of Manitoba. The animals are the same. This is what I did. I applied for a PhD after Australia. I got the admission. I came here to Winnipeg for my PhD from 2013 into 2018 and the rest is just history. I came here, I did a PhD, then I moved on. I went to McMaster in Ontario for like a few years and then the position opened up here in our department and I moved back. I mean, Winnipeg never lets you go. I came here, I started my position as a professor in 22.

Peter Froelich 4:16

Very cool. A quick question about the dairies in Iran. What is the difference between a dairy operation in Iran than it is in Canada?

Hooman Derakhshani 4:25

I think it's very similar to the farms in in Canada, but the farms back there in Iran are basically, I would say they're larger. I mean, we have farms, it's very typical to have 800, 1,000 or even up to 5,000, 10,000 lactating cows over there. So it's more similar to some of the states in the US. But the systems, both are intensive dairy farming systems. These are not similar to what I experienced in Australia, for example. Those are pasture-based, you know, not as intense as the way we do it here. So very similar in terms of the management systems.

Peter Froelich 4:59

It's interesting how you grew up dairy cows and now you're working with dairy cows also, right?

Hooman Derakhshani 5:04

It is, yeah. So again, it really goes back to the passion that you grew up with, yeah.

Peter Froelich 5:08

And it's a very common thing that I hear from animal scientists is that they have a passion for animals. It's nice to hear that you also have a passion for animals. Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about your research a little bit. So what is your research area about and why is it important?

Hooman Derakhshani 5:22

I'm a microbiome scientist. I'm sure you've heard about the word microbiome I mean, pretty sure, I mean, you and most people, you've seen probiotics, prebiotics. So if you go to any drugstore, if you go to any grocery shop even now, yeah, so you could see all these different brandings, labels on those that, you know, promote your gut health, they promote the immune system. If you have pets, I'm pretty sure that you've seen the biome foods for the pets, yes, again, to help them improve the digestive system, the immune system of the pets. So basically, my research is also about the same thing. So we are looking at the micro biome, which basically means a fancy word, it's a buzzword, but what it refers to is the collection of the microbes that live in our digestive system and our skins. I can talk more about those, but we have trillions of those microbes in our body, and 99.99% of those, those are beneficial microbes, that we need them, we rely on them. They do many important functions. They train our immune system, for example. When we are born, during the infancy, our immune system is very naive. It's not developed it cannot take care of us but what happens is that as we age our immune system through the interaction with these microbes it learns how to protect our body yeah so and many of these microbes they are not there to to harm our body they're to basically protect our body against the harmful microbes so that's one of the functions the other thing that these microbes do is that they kind of you know increase our metabolic potential so in simple words they let us eat the things that we cannot eat or digest yeah for example for humans when you hear that fibers are good for your health, are good for the gut health. Fibers are basically the plant cellulose material. Our body, I mean humans, animals, we don't have enzymes. We don't produce the enzymes to use cellulose. What happens is that these microbes, they live with us and they can use the cellulose. And when they use that, they produce energy for us. They produce metabolites that are beneficial for our health. And this is basically how they enhance our metabolic potential. But the most interesting thing that these microbes microbes do is that I always describe them as a biochemical factory. They are amazing. The tiny bug that you cannot see can produce over tens or hundreds of different chemicals metabolized and each of them they have a specific function in our body. So just consider that you have massive biochemical factories inside your body that are producing beneficial stuff for you. So basically in my research what I'm doing when I say I'm a microbiome scientist, I'm trying to learn, to understand what are the ways that these microbes are basically contributing to the health, to the performance of the farm animals. Yeah, because I'm mostly working with cattle and pigs. And that's my goal to see, I mean, how we can use these microbes first to learn what they do and then how we can use them to improve the health and performance of the farm animals. That's basically my research goal in a nutshell.

Peter Froelich 8:17

Okay, very interesting. The study of the microbiome, is that something fairly new or has it been happening for a long time?

Hooman Derakhshani 8:24

The way we are doing it is... kind of recent. It started to basically bloom or started to get attention in the last two decades. And that's because of new technologies that came into the market. So basically there are next generation sequencing platforms, but basically what they do is that they can sequence the genomes of the humans, microbes, animals in a very high throughput scale. Previously we knew that microbes are there, but we didn't know how diverse they are, how many of them we have in our body. So if I tell you that our bodies are mostly microbial cells rather than human cells, in your own body, just in your gut, you have probably 10 times of the human cells that you have in your body. You have microbial cells. So these things, we didn't know them until just like 15, 20 years ago that these new technologies came and we had access to them. The reason I asked the question, even from when I was young, growing up in Eastern Europe, we were fed kefir almost every morning. I didn't really understand why It tasted great, but it's because of the probiotic. Because there's a huge connection between gut health and your overall health. Exactly. And the same is for animals than it is for humans.

Peter Froelich 9:37

What questions are you asking in your research and what are you trying to solve?

Hooman Derakhshani 9:40

The two main areas that I'm looking into. So the first one is to come up with new solutions for infectious diseases. Because one of the challenges that we are facing as a society is that we need to feed the increasing global population. Our farmers, the agri-food industry, the main mission is basically to feed people. The population is increasing in massive numbers. Projected that by 2050, we are going to have over 10 billion people. Now these people, they're going to need food and including our basically high quality animal-based protein. So to do that, what the society has decided to do and the industry is moving more and more into that direction is intensify the farming systems. You want to be as efficient as possible. You want to use the minimum amount of land, resources to produce the proteins. And that is usually enabled by intensified farms. When you put a lot of animals together, obviously infectious diseases become a big challenge. So what we have been using, I mean, so far, traditionally was to use antibiotics. Of course, we have improved the hygiene systems, the biosecurity of the farms. But regardless, we are still using a lot of antibiotics to prevent the infectious diseases. And if I tell you, just to give you a number, about 80% of antimicrobials, antibiotics that produce around the world, including in Canada, they're used in farm animals just to support the food production system. That number is scary. Why? Because when you use antibiotics, these bacteria, these microbes are very smart. What they do is that they evolve and they start to develop what we call antimicrobial resistance. And that antimicrobial resistance, in simple words, we call them drug-resistant bugs or pathogens. They're a threat to human society and also to the animals because if they develop that resistance, And if those are the bad bacteria, the pathogens, now they can kill humans. They can kill animals. Right now, we have over 2 million people. There are many different reports somewhere between 1.5 to 3 million people every year that are dying because of antimicrobial resistance. If we don't have any solution for that, it's predicted that by 2030, it's going to increase to basically over 10 million people. So basically, it's going to kill more people than cancer is doing right now. So we can't continue using antibiotics at the current rate. In fact, farm production, farming system. So we need new solutions. And that's one of the things that I'm trying to answer here. So when we want to ask farmers to stop using antibiotics, they need to have alternate solutions. And that's one of my main objectives, to try to look at these microbiomes, see what type of solutions I can come up with these microbes to offer them to the farmers to use it instead of the antibiotics to improve the health and performance of the animals, to prevent the infectiousness. That's one of them. The the environmental footprints of the farm animals. Other than this antimicrobial resistance, the other important footprint is greenhouse gas emission. So the cattle, I always tell to my undergrads in my classes that they are amazing. Everything that comes to cattle, those are massive numbers. They drink something like 80 to 100 litres of water every day. Each cow, they can produce over hundreds, up to a thousand litres of methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas. And they're burping it, it goes to the environment, that becomes greenhouse gas challenge now for the human basically approach is to to see if i can come up with microbial solutions to to mitigate those greenhouse gas emissions

Peter Froelich 13:04

Quick question, just going back to the probiotic and the antimicrobial resistance so what would be like a solution that you would potentially provide to producers after your research has completed.

Hooman Derakhshani 13:14

The ultimate goal is to to come up with different type of products like probiotics new or what we call the next generation of probiotics because right now what we have in the market is just a few bacteria that are safe probiotic and you can see them on all different labels like the bacillus, you know, bifidobacteria. But those are not the only microbes that they have probiotic potential. So we are trying to find novel ones, especially the ones that are coming from those animals. That's a very important point because many of the probiotics that you see in the market, they are not coming from the animal that they are basically targeting. So we get probiotics from milk, which is coming from dairy cows and we want to feed that to humans or vice versa. So we get something from human or from a cow, we want to feed it to the pig. So this is not the best match. Each animal, they have their own beneficial bacteria. So hopefully we can come up with new probiotics, more complicated, more complex recipes of those probiotics that can help that animal fight pathogens. So basically, let's, for example, say E. coli. Everyone knows E. coli is a pathogen. So we have many pathogens within that E. coli species of the bacterias. We can come up with a specific bacteria from that animal that has the ability to kill or inhibit the E. coli. So now instead of using antibiotics to treat that animal, now we can use that probiotic. So that's one example. The other one is that we can use postbiotics. So postbiotics are basically the metabolites that these bacteria produce. So sometimes we can't use those bacteria directly because it's impossible. In some cases, many of them, they're strictly anaerobic, which means that if you expose them to oxygen, if you want to produce them in large amounts, they cannot survive. But what we can do is to ask them to produce what they do metabolize. And then we extract those metabolites and give them to the animals to improve their health. There are different ways that we can do that. Those are the $1 million questions that we are trying to answer.

Peter Froelich 15:07

And so how do prebiotics fit into the equation?

Hooman Derakhshani 15:10

So there are three terms again. Yeah. So probiotic in simple words are the life beneficial bacteria that you can feed to humans, animals to improve the gut health. Prebiotic are basically the food or dietary ingredients that humans and animals cannot use in themselves, but the bacteria, they can use them. And once you feed those feed ingredients, they're going to increase the population of those beneficial bacteria in your gut. And that's basically indirectly, you're adding something to feed the bacteria. So those are prebiotic. And then the last term is the postbiotics. Again, those are the fermentation product or what the metabolites and all different stuff that the bacteria produce. That refers to the postbiotic. So we have three different terms, but they're all related to the beneficial microbes in our guts.

Peter Froelich 15:55

What is the most surprising thing or research discovery that you have come up so far in the last few years that you've been working on?

Hooman Derakhshani 16:02

Oh, microbes, they don't stop surprising you. I mean, every day that we go to our lab, we have a surprise over there. One of the things that we do in our lab is to basically grow these microbiomes. Not many groups do that around the world, but we love to do that, basically. And what we do is that basically we try to mimic the environment that we want to grow in. We have anaerobic chambers in our lab. There is no oxygen in them. We flush those with a specific gas combinations that are similar to digestive system and we start growing these microbes and once you grow them you see what they can do many of them they look different and once we we start looking at the genome of these microbes now we see oh my gosh I mean every single of them they can produce over 30 to 40 different compounds that they have drug potential because we are using a lot of you know genomics machine learning we can predict what they do we can't definitely show what they are doing but we can predict that and many of them they over 40 different compounds that they have drug potential. Just imagine that a tiny bug that you cannot see that in your body, it's producing all these compounds that they can save lives. That's a very humbling experience. And that's something that the mother nature is showing us, is teaching us. So I don't want to use the term discovery because I'm not discovering this. If I'm a good student, I'm just trying to learn a few of these things. And hopefully over the course of my career, I can try to identify a few of these things that they can save lives or they can improve the performance of the animal. Yeah, I mean, they never stop to amuse you.

Peter Froelich 17:31

You look very passionate and you talk very passionately about your work. That's wonderful. So you've talked about cattle and swine. What about poultry? Is there a type of work for poultry?

Hooman Derakhshani 17:40

I always get criticized for that. I forgot to mention the poultry. So poultry and the pigs, I mean, we put them under the monogastric category. They are similar to each other when you compare them to ruminants because ruminants, they are a completely different world. The rumen in cattle, I mean, it's a different system. That's only because of the microbes. I don't want to go into too much details. If you just think about it, cattle are the only group of animals that they can basically thrive on 100% plant forage material. So those are the only group of animals. And that's because of the microbes they have in their stomach, in the rumen. For the monogastrics, like pigs, poultry, they are very similar to humans. So our digestive system is very similar. So we do a lot of similar research in the way that we are doing for the pigs with poultry as well. So that's the reason I usually forget to mention the poultry.

Peter Froelich 18:28

We're certainly looking forward to results and all the great findings and farmers are looking forward to the information so like antibiotics I mean that's huge is to be able to get away from antibiotics and that kind of works.

Hooman Derakhshani 18:39

Yeah I should mention I mean our farmers are also really aware of these challenges they are supportive I mean we get a lot of support a lot of attention from our farmers because they are all good I mean they just want to be the best farmer they love their animals they care for them they want to care for them as best as they can. Again, going back to the issue of the antimicrobial resistance, they really don't have much option because they need to produce it. And it's important for global security. So if we ask them to stop using the antibiotics, we need to give them some alternate solutions. And they would welcome those solutions, but we need to do that. That's my hope.

Peter Froelich 19:15

Great focus. Aside from the research, can you tell us one thing that you do outside of the university and outside of research that keeps you going?

Hooman Derakhshani 19:23

I love outdoor activities. Before moving to to Canada I was a professional mountain climber really yeah so I mean we have that's awesome oh back home in Iran we have over 400 mountains that they are over 4,000 meters I always tell that around the European Alps you have only around 40 of those mountains there are 400 of them back in Iran so I was out in the mountain every weekend so that was my passion my love to rock climbing ice climbing all those things and then I moved to Winnipeg the most flat but I mean the Winnipeg yeah I I love camping. I do backcountry camping. I've been to many of the lakes. I mean, here in Winnipeg, I usually go to Whiteshaw for those lakes, you know, Caddy Lake, Falcon Lake, that area of the lot of sport fishing.

Peter Froelich 20:08

That's really great. Yeah, Manitoba is a beautiful province. Even though there's no mountains, there's lots of amazing things.

Hooman Derakhshani 20:15

There are a lot of things to do outdoors. Yeah, I agree with that.

Peter Froelich 20:18

And that's it for today's episode of ChangeMAKErs. Thank you, Dr. Dherakhshani, for chatting with us today about your fascinating research and about your path to become a researcher. And thank you all for listening. Join me in future episodes of ChangeMAKErs to hear about the fascinating research being led by agri-food innovators at the University of Manitoba.

Hooman Derakhshani 20:37

Thank you.