Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.
A green vaccine: Using plants to protect poultry from Salmonella
You’ve whipped up a delicious cake and the beater is dripping with batter. What do you do? Lick it? Think again. Poultry eggs and meat are a common source of Salmonella, a bacteria that can cause gut-churning consequences. Poultry pose a significant concern as they can harbour large amounts of Salmonella without showing any symptoms, making it difficult to identify contaminated birds. While numerous control measures can be used on poultry farms to prevent Salmonella contamination, they are often costly and/or difficult to implement. Therefore, my goal is to develop a ‘green’ vaccine: an edible Salmonella vaccine that is made in plants. This would provide a cheaper and easier method of protecting poultry, as the leaves of the plant could be ground into a powder and added to poultry feed. If effective, this could reduce the prevalence of Salmonella in poultry flocks and subsequently lower the rate of human infection.
Carly Charron
PhD candidate, Biology
Faculty of Science - Western University
Supervisors
Rima Menassa (https://www.uwo.ca/biology//people/crossappointed-adjunct-and-sessional-faculty.html#RMenassa)
Anne Simon (https://simonlab.wixsite.com/simonlab)
Carly obtained her BSc in Genetics at Western University in 2020 and is currently pursuing her PhD in Biology, specializing in Cell and Molecular Biology. She works in the lab of Dr. Rima Menassa at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and her research is focused on using plants to develop an edible vaccine to prevent Salmonella colonization in poultry. Her goal is to produce a novel vaccine for poultry that is cheaper and easier to administer than those currently available on the market, making vaccination more accessible to Canadian poultry farmers. Outside of the lab, Carly enjoys participating in communication and outreach activities. She was previously a host on GradCast, a graduate-student-run podcast at Western University. She currently volunteers with Let’s Talk Science as a Workshop Facilitator, and is the Communications Chair for Western Science Rendezvous, an annual festival that brings science out of the labs and into the community.
You can connect with Carly on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/carly-charron-a58b57152/.
View Carly's work as it appears in the Inspiring Minds Digital Collection: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/inspiringminds/630/.