- Research collaboration launched: In early 2024, Barnwell Bio established a collaboration with leading poultry health expert Dr. Steven Ricke at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.
- What we have learned so far: We find that the microbial content in litter is very different from that found in egg wash water taken from eggs from the same pen.
- We have shared this information with the broader scientific community: UW postdoctoral researcher Elena Olson presented on the differences in litter and egg wash at the 2025 Poultry Science Association meeting.
In our second study with Dr. Steven Ricke’s laboratory (see previous post for our first study together), we explored the microbiome of different environmental sample types. As part of this study we collected a ‘whole pen’ aggregate litter sample, along with collecting residual egg wash water from a commercial egg washer used to clean 120 eggs collected from the same pen at roughly the same time. When we extracted genetic material (DNA) from these two environmental sample types we found that although DNA concentration was much higher from the litter sample, the extracted DNA was of lower quality and more highly fragmented than that collected from egg wash. Next, we performed shotgun metagenomic sequencing on each sample type (click here to learn more about shotgun metagenomic sequencing) to gain an unbiased view of the microbial communities present. We found that the litter sample contained a greater abundance of gut-associated and fecal associated species as might be expected. In contrast, the egg wash water contained bacterial species more commonly associated with surfaces and water-based environments. In addition, the wash water sample had a much higher number of species detected.
Additional work will be needed to determine if what we have observed here is a consistent pattern (this current work involved only one sample of each type as a pilot), but this small pilot study suggests that different sample sources may provide distinct but complementary views of the poultry environment. Already we are exploring additional sample types as part of our Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research grant to determine how best to monitor barns for avian influenza.
