Mantovani is an assistant professor of animal and dairy sciences who specializes in rumen microbial physiology at UW–Madison. His research program is focused on understanding the functions and ecological interactions between anaerobic microbes that colonize the gastrointestinal tract of ruminants. Mantovani’s position is funded by the Dairy Innovation Hub.
Postdoc (pictured above): MD Gahangir Alam is a postdoctoral research associate in the Mantovani lab in the Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences at UW–Madison. He specializes in microbiology.
Diarrhea is one of the primary causes of mortality in neonatal dairy calves and results in financial losses to dairy farmers. Factors associated with birth seasons such as temperature, crowding and housing conditions, humidity, pathogen distribution, and hygiene conditions also affect the risk of neonatal calves developing diarrhea. Despite the efforts to characterize the changes in the gut microbiome of dairy calves during the pre-weaning period, no study has compared the microbiota of healthy and diarrheic animals using both next-generation sequencing and culturomics approaches or evaluated the influence of seasonal changes in the fecal microbiome of healthy and diarrheic dairy calves. Here we aim to expand the current knowledge regarding the establishment of different microbial groups in the GIT in early life, which could help dairy farmers design more efficient intervention strategies to manage microbial colonization of neonatal calves. We will use Next-Gen Sequencing and culturomics approaches to evaluate differences in the intestinal microbiota of healthy and diarrheic calves in winter and summer periods and will select bacteria with health-promoting activities from healthy animals to develop synthetic microbial consortia with enhanced capacity to convert milk oligosaccharides to short chain fatty acids, particularly butyric acid.