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Research scientist 111 Price Hall (0331) Phone: (540) 231-6155
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My major research focus involves studying the feasibility of using medicinal plants as alternative sources of antibiotics in poultry feed for growth promotion and disease prevention. There has long been an interest in screening plants and their derived natural products for biological activity, often with the aim of producing new drugs. A growing body of evidence suggests that medicinal plants are good candidates for developing new agents for the treatment and prevention of bacterial infections. Widespread use of antimicrobials for disease control and growth promotion in animals such as poultry has been paralleled by an increase in resistance in those bacteria such as Salmonella and Campylobacter that can spread from animals, often through food, to cause infections in humans. The indiscriminate use of antibiotics could ultimately compromise the treatment of bacterial infections in humans as many of these drugs are identical to or closely resemble drugs used in human medicine. My research may provide Virginia agriculture with potential new sources of plant-derived antibiotics as growth promoters thus decreasing reliance on standard antibiotics and risking increases in bacterial resistance spreading from animals to the environment and more importantly into the food production chain.
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