Mice help researcher study how cow's diet affects milk-fat content
A dairy nutritionist in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences is conducting genetic research with mice to determine if cows can be influenced by diet to produce milk with a higher fat content. You read that right. "On the surface, it may seem like a strange concept, experimenting with mice to learn things about cows," said Kevin Harvatine, assistant professor of nutritional physiology. "But the lactating dairy cow is not amenable to transgenic approaches. The mouse offers the greatest opportunity for genomic manipulation, and we have successfully developed a lactating mouse model to investigate milk-fat depression in dairy cows." (more)