Newly Characterised Molecule has Potential to Change Approach to Dealing with Swine Disease

A researcher with the University of Saskatchewan is confident the discovery of a newly characterised naturally occurring molecule has the potential to change the approach to controlling swine disease.With funding provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Saskatchewan Agriculture Development Fund and RDAR, a University of Saskatchewan research team has identified a bacteria-killing molecule that enhances the immune response of the pig to disease.

Dr. Matheus Costa, an Associate Professor with the Western College of Veterinary Medicine, says the molecule is a naturally occurring peptide or protein.

Quote-Dr. Matheus Costa-University of Saskatchewan:

We have been investigating swine dysentery, which is a disease that affects pigs world wide, and during those research trials, we noticed that not every single pig would become sick.It didn't quite matter how hard we attempted to induce disease for this study, there was always a portion of pigs that were deemed resilient to infection and that sparked the question, "Why are they not developing the clinical signs such as the others if they are all in the same environment, receiving the same feed and the same bacteria?"

So, we started diving into that and we learned that, even though they all share the same genetics and they all live in the same place, they don't respond to infection the same way and some pigs seem to be better equipped to respond to these infections than the others.So, the goal at the time was to identify why are some pigs resistant to disease and some others are not, so there must be a genetic component to that and that's what we identified.
Those pigs that seem to be resistant to infection, they had a higher load of this specific molecule.

Dr. Costa notes, not only does this molecule have an antimicrobial property but it also plays a role in modulating the pig's response to the pathogen so it doesn't feel the effects of the infection as much and, unlike antibiotics, this molecule affects both bacteria and viruses and may also work against fungal infections.