FUNCTIONAL GENOMICS AND GENETIC ANALYSIS OF THE INNATE IMMUNE RESPONSE REQUIRED TO RESIST FOOD-BORNE BACTERIAL INFECTIONS IN POULTRY

Poultry producers suffer major economic losses both from mortality due to infectious diseases, and from contamination of food products due to transfer of microorganisms. As a result, they have a keen interest in breeding birds capable of resisting infection by enteric food-borne pathogens such as Salmonella and Campylobacter, and the development of novel immunologically based strategies to control pathogenic microorganisms in the gastrointestinal tract of poultry. Understanding how the immune system is regulated and responds to infectious agents requires whole system approaches given that single immunological parameters have been unable to unlock immune system complexity. It is increasingly important to be able to measure changes in the expression of multiple genes in a tissue or animal in response to a single physiological change. The availability of the chicken genome sequence provides the opportunity to resolve questions concerning the molecular components of the innate immune system. Key developments in molecular, genetic, and cellular biological techniques provide us with new approaches to use the genome to investigate the functional genomics (the study of the how and why a given gene behaves in a certain way under specific conditions) and pathogenomics (the study of how genes behave when pathogens interact with their host) of the avian innate response to Salmonella and Campylobacter. Our primary goal is the use of genomic technologies to understand prospective control points for modulating innate immunity, thus providing the poultry industry with novel, pre-harvest intervention tools to control food-borne pathogens and provide safe food products to the consumer.