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LIRU Website
Mission
The mission of the Livestock Issues Research Unit is to conduct fundamental research to determine how stress affects the physiological and behavioral responses of livestock and how stress induced alterations in immune responses relate to pre-harvest food safety; to develop management practices and alternative production systems that reduce animal pathogen loads prior to processing and enhance animal well-being.
Food Safety: Neuroendocrine stress response and pathogen shedding. Current research at LIRU involves application of a swine chronic stress model to determine the link between animal stress and enteric pathogen shedding.
Animal Health: Current research is dedicated to developing management practices to control and eliminate agricultural pathogens. Provide enhanced survival of young pigs, testing of feed additives to improve health and wellbeing during weaning, growing, and finishing.
Livestock Behavior: Current research is dedicated to developing methods to facilitate and automate behavior monitoring.
Bioinformatics: Our research into bioinformatics is a long term mission that will drive our Research Unit far into the future. By combining functional genomics, genetic mapping, microarray analyses and artificial intelligence modeling of the psychoneuroimmunological system we are seeking to develop a global and functional picture of the host-pathogen interrelationship that will help us improve the health and safety of livestock.
