International Veterinary Student Explores Innovative Bovine Respiratory Disease Research Techniques At VERO

Story by Courtney Price, VMBS Marketing & Communications

September 10, 2025

A new technology called adaptive sampling may be the key to improving the accuracy of microbial analysis in BRD research.

Bovine respiratory disease (BRD) is a global threat to beef and dairy production — in the United States alone, BRD costs the cattle industry around $1 billion annually in prevention, management, and treatment fees, as well as in herd losses.

Because of the severity of the problem, researchers like those at Texas A&M’s Veterinary Education, Research, & Outreach (VERO) program are using innovative techniques to understand the causes of BRD and improve prevention and management strategies.

They’re also sharing their expertise with animal health experts from around the world, including Paul Klett, a third-year veterinary medicine student at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich with a strong passion for large animal medicine, especially beef and dairy cattle.

This summer, Klett was able to conduct research at VERO’s campus in Canyon, Texas, the heart of the U.S. cattle industry. His experience was made possible by the Boehringer-Ingelheim Veterinary Scholars Program and the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences’ (VMBS) Veterinary Medical Scientist Research Training Program (VMSRTP), both of which help to connect veterinary students with biomedical research opportunities.

“There are a lot of BRD experts at VERO, and it was a really cool and unique experience to engage with cutting-edge research in the laboratory,” Klett said. “The summer program was a good first experience with research and it further solidified my plans to do research after I graduate from my veterinary medicine program.”

Applying New Research Techniques

Through his work with VMBS assistant professor Dr. Robert Valeris-Chacin at VERO, Klett was able to try out new technologies that enable researchers to examine bacteria in respiratory samples with increased accuracy and granularity.

One such bacteria is Mannheimia haemolytica, a major player among the pathogens associated with BRD that can be difficult to study because of strain diversity — the degree to which individual bacteria carry different traits. When strain diversity is high, current diagnostic tools can have a hard time distinguishing the bacterial strains, reducing the ability to study which strains cause BRD and to detect them in a sample.

“Previous research at VERO indicated that the strain diversity associated with M. haemolytica seems to be underestimated, and using current metagenomic approaches, it is challenging to study individual strains of the bacteria,” Klett said. “Our research studied adaptive sampling, which is a promising tool that enables sequencing only the DNA of interest in samples. We expect that this tool will make studying bacteria like M. haemolytica at the strain level feasible.”

Having more accurate and sensitive tools for detecting bacteria saves researchers time, energy, and financial resources.

“For our project, we used adaptive sampling on respiratory samples from beef cattle to determine if we could sequence only the M. haemolytica DNA present in those samples, ” Klett said. “Our results showed that approximately 97% of the sequenced DNA was M. haemolytica DNA, which is impressive and shows that adaptive sampling is a very promising technique for future BRD research.”

Building Research Skills

For Klett, the experience at VERO was an important step in his career that gave him hands-on practice with research techniques he may need in the near future. It was also a valuable opportunity to meet people with similar research interests.

“What’s really important to me is that it wasn’t just a way to improve my technical or professional skills,” he said. “Of course, a big part was engaging with research, but it was also important to me to meet new people and future colleagues. This was especially true at the Veterinary Scholars Symposium in Spokane, Washington that concluded the program, which was a good opportunity to meet people from other universities and make connections.”

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For more information about the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, please visit our website at vetmed.tamu.edu or join us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Contact Information: Jennifer Gauntt, Director of VMBS Communications, Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, jgauntt@cvm.tamu.edu, 979-862-4216

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