What do cows and giraffes have in common? Probably to most people, the similarities between these two mammals are hard to find, but for biology majors senior Daniel Kish and junior Mikalah Smith, these animals will hopefully be the key to a groundbreaking senior research project.
“We are doing original research,” Kish said. “This hasn’t been done before.”
Judilee Marrow, veterinarian at Binder Park Zoo, brought the idea for the research to Kish’s attention.
Because giraffes typically live in warmer climates, during the winter months they must be housed inside a building—with cement floors. Standing on cement instead of dirt puts stress on the hooves of the giraffe, causing stress fractures to occur.
The real challenge of the project appears when veterinarians try to detect whether the hoof is fractured or not. Because the giraffes display no physical signs of having a fracture, the only way to detect the injury is through an x-rays –a very costly procedure.
Unless Kish and Smith’s research discovers a cheaper alternative.
Looking for key proteins that indicate inflammation and a hoof fracture, Kish started the project not by working with giraffes, but by working with cows.
Because dairy farm cows are typically housed in barns with cement floors, their hooves display many of the same problems as the giraffes.
Also, the cows have more exposure to previous research. As a result they have more information readily available for researchers, and for the purpose of Kish’s research, knowledge about the entire DNA sequence of the cow, which is needed to create a primer to detect the protein produced due to a fracture.
For Kish, protein detection with the cow was successful, but the translation of the research from cow to giraffe raised a problems: the full DNA sequence of giraffes has not been fully recorded, so there wasn’t a way to detect which specific primer he needed to use to detect the protein.
“We were hoping that the genes had been conserved enough through evolution that by the time it got to giraffes it should be similar to the cows,” Smith said.
Kish said that not getting the expected results could be frustrating especially when he had been working on the project consistently since last summer.
“It’s kind of like this empty feeling,” Kish said. “You put in all this work and it just doesn’t work, and you don’t really understand why.”
Picking up the project from behind Kish, Smith looks to translate Kish’s findings and research on the cows into relatable terms for the giraffes.
But this won’t be easy with missing DNA data. The students are left to guessing and picking giraffe DNA sequence to use for primers.
“Developing primers and optimizing primers when there is no sequencing data is difficult,” associate professor of biology Jeffrey VanZant said. “It’s like you’re shooting in the dark.”
Although a difficult and frustrating guessing game, Kish said it took him a while to realize that all the information, whether planned or not, was valuable information.
“Nothing we get is bad results, they just aren’t favorable.” Kish said. “But they all tell us something, but they just might not be the ones we were hoping for.”
VanZant said the end goal of the research project is not the outcome, but rather what the students learn along the way.
“Here at Hillsdale our objective is to teach and to get them ready to go,” VanZant said. “We aren’t here to train students to go on to future levels, but we are here to teach.”
Smith said that although they may not finish the project by the end of her senior year, the project would still be a success. Kish agrees.
“It’s just the feeling of doing something else that no one else has done that’s made it tolerable.”
