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.
Carly Charron
PhD candidate, Faculty of Science
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.