Postgraduate research students

Among food animal sources, poultry has a great importance due to its efficiency on meat production and quality of the produced meat. Nowadays, broiler chicken meat is the most
produced meat along the world and its production is predicted to keep increasing, this fact is quite important in a world with an increasing population that not always meets its protein nutritional requirements.

But poultry industry faces several challenges being the most important the removal of antimicrobial growth promoters from its production. Antibiotics has been used over the last
60 years for improving chicken growth and efficiency as well as its immune status. Ban on the usage of antibiotics in the European Union due to antimicrobial resistance concerns make necessary to find alternatives for the poultry industry in order to maintain its growing rate.
Dietary supplementation with novel feed compounds that have a beneficial effect on chickens performance and health has been proposed as an alternative to antibiotics. Several
feed compounds have reported promising potential by modulating chickens microbiota and gut health as well as showing immunomodulatory effects like prebiotics or phytogenics.

Concrete effects of this compounds need to be assessed and dynamic proteomics has been proposed as an innovative approach for doing it. Dynamic proteomics is the application of
novel high - throughput proteomics tools to the study of protein dynamics. Protein dynamics is an area of knowledge that have been historically limited due to the necessity of isolating individual proteins in order to measure its fractional synthesis rate, but development of chromatography and mass – spectrometry that have resulted in the development of OMICS tools have increased its potential as an approach capable of identifying novel markers of health and growth.

In addition to its throughput limitation, study of protein dynamics has historically been an expensive approach due to the necessity of using isotopic labelled amino acids as a tracer for measuring protein synthesis. The use of deuterium water as an isotopic tracer has been proposed as an alternative being cheaper as well as having many other benefits compared to labelled amino acids.

Protein synthesis is a key process during growth as well as being affected due to disease status, due to this fact its study seems adequate for the assessment of novel feed compounds effects on broiler chickens. In addition, protein synthesis study has the potential of discovering not only new but early markers of growth and disease due to the fact that protein synthesis in an organism changes before a change in protein concentration can be measured.

• Professor Tom Preston
• Dr Mark McLaughlin

External supervisors

Dr. Mangesh Bhide (Institute of Immunology, University of Veterinary Medicine and Pharmacy in Kosice)

Dr Chris Chadwick (President at Life Diagnostics, Pennsylvania)

EU EPIC-XS Consortium: "Muscle Dynamic Proteomics, a novel pipeline for discovering early markers of growth in broiler chicken and to assess the effect of novel feed compounds on growth".

2021 Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund (ISSF) - Feasibility Scheme Application: " Investigating markers of muscle turnover in the plasma protein pool".

2020 Research Award - World Poultry Science Association UK Branch: "Dynamic proteomics, an innovative approach to assess the effect of novel feed compounds on broiler chickens gut barrier function".

The Edgar Pye Research Award 2020 - Society of Feed Technologists: "Faecal dynamic metaproteomics, a non invasive strategy to assess the effect of novel feed compounds on gut barrier function in broiler chickens".

(Accepted) Peinado-Izaguerri, J; Mclaughlin, M; Mckeegan, D; Riva, F; Bain, M; Bhide, M; Preston, T. Preliminary application of dynamic proteomics to study broiler chicken growth and health status. European Federation of Animal Science Annual Meeting 2021. 2021. Davos, Switzerland. Theatre presentation.

(Accepted) Peinado-Izaguerri, J; Riva, F; Mclaughlin, M; Mckeegan, D; Bain, M; Bhide, M; Preston, T. A novel approach for the measurement of broiler chicken albumin synthesis rate. World Poultry Congress 2021. 2021. Paris, France. TBD.

Peinado-Izaguerri, J; Riva, F; Mclaughlin, M; Mckeegan, D; Bain, M; Bhide, M; Preston, T. GC-MS analysis of albumin synthesis to assess the effect of novel feed compounds on broiler chickens. American Society of Mass Spectrometry Reboot 2020. 2020. On-line. Poster presentation.