Building a Better Chicken

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded researchers from UGA and the U.S.D.A. almost $1.6 million to build a better chicken, one resistant to the devastating Newcastle Virus.

The research time will be working on new technology that will let them breed disease-resistant chickens. Every year, Newcastle Virus kills about one-quarter of the millions of chickens in sub-Saharan Africa, where poultry is a critical source of income and protein for farmers and their families.

“Disease and death in livestock are serious problems, particularly in underdeveloped countries,” said Steve Stice, an Eminent Scholar and animal and dairy professor in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

Veterinary care is basic in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, he said. Livestock isn’t just a source of food, it’s also “a large share of their savings, income, credit, insurance, loans, gifts and investments.”

Besides Stice, the research team includes co-investigator Franklin West, a CAES animal and dairy science assistant professor, UGA poultry scientist Robert Beckstead and Claudio Alfonso, a researcher at the USDA Poultry Research Laboratory.

The team will investigate applying a process called cellular adaptive resistance, which uses stem cells to create disease resistance in animals. The approach is a direct offshoot of previous work by Stice and West that produced pigs from stem cells using a similar process.

“We want to provide a new way to create disease-resistant animals using new technologies to combat disease problems,” Stice said. “This process will produce animals with natural resistance to specific diseases that will need less veterinary care and will significantly reduce livestock mortalities.”