Investigation of Neural-Immune Profiling, Transcriptomics and Proteomics and Clinical Tools in Assessing Navy Dolphin Health
2007
Romano, Tracy
The United States Navy maintains and employs approximately 70 bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), and 25 sea lions (Zalophus californianus). These marine mammals are deployed all over the world and are specially trained to carry out specific missions and to provide Fleet support for the U.S. Navy. Given the value of these animals to the U.S. Navy, health maintenance and disease prevention for these animals are vital to the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program's (NMMP) mission and focus. In order to maintain health and disease prevention in these animals it is critical to have the tools to assess health status before, during and after deployment as well as assess efficacy of preventative measures such as vaccines and immunostimulants. This proposal represents the continued development and initial evaluation of three merging technologies that have been focused on advancing our understanding of marine mammal health and disease. These technologies include immune profiling with the advent of dolphin-specific reagents and assays, functional genomics utilizing a dolphin microarray and proteomics. These technologies will continued to be developed, and the technologies will be applied to a subset of archived dolphin samples including both healthy and ill dolphins. Results from these technologies will be analyzed in conjunction with available clinical data to evaluate the potential in determining and assessing dolphin health.
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