CoPIs: Soren Buus (University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark); William Golde (USDA/Plum Island Animal Disease Center); Vish Nene, (International Livestock Research Institute [ILRI], Nairobi, Kenya)
Collaborators: Morten Nielsen (Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark); Philip Toye (International Livestock Research Institute [ILRI], Nairobi, Kenya)
Cattle, and especially dairy cattle, are an important agricultural resource to smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, providing a source of animal protein to farm families, as well as income through increased market opportunities. East Coast fever (ECF) and Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) are two high priority diseases impacting cattle health and productivity and are a major constraint on cattle productivity and create vulnerabilities for smallholder farmers in developing countries. The objective of this international project is to characterize the bovine immune response at the molecular level in an effort to aid and accelerate the development of vaccine technology for ECF and FMC, which significantly impact smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. This project will develop an important new technology - MHC tetramers - for evaluation of cattle T-cell immune response to these two critical diseases. This novel strategy will provide important basic information on the molecular recognition events in the mmune response of cattle to these two diseases.
Broader Impacts: The molecular immunological information gained in this project will aid in accelerating the evaluation of the immune response to natural infections and vaccination and will provide a foundation of knowledge and tools for vaccine development in general. In the long term, this project will enhance global cattle health through the dissemination of improved infection and vaccine assessment technologies. The long-term impacts of these efforts on developing countries are anticipated to include reduced vulnerability of smallholder farmers to agricultural resource losses due to animal disease, i.e. negative impacts on cattle productivity, morbidity and mortality. Additional impacts include establishing international research collaborations between faculty and students at an undergraduate and EPSCoR institution (The University of Vermont) with both governmental and non-governmental partners. An important component of this includes the transfer of cutting-edge technologies via North-South collaborations and capacity building. This research collaboration also integrates a broader goal to enhance young scientist research training and pre- and post-veterinary education opportunities by strengthening partnerships between academic, federal, and international scientists to address global animal health issues of national importance for the United States and developing countries including those of sub-Saharan Africa. Data generated in this project will be made available on public access scientific databases including: Immuno Polymorphism Database (IPD) MHC database for cattle (BoLA) sequences (www.ebi.ac.uk/ipd/mhc/); Epitope Database (IEDB) website (www.immuneepitope.org/); and /Theileria parva/database (TparvaDB) website (http://tparvadb.ilri.cgiar.org/).
