Welcome to the dog owner microbiome study blog! This is my first post and I am so excited to start this project. It is funded my the first small grant from the UCD School of Veterinary Medicine Overhead Investment Programme. I am so grateful to the School for giving me this opportunity to start this study.
The funding was awarded to me in February 2021, and I was planning to start it immediately and finish within a year – so we are actually coming close to my primary deadline of February 2022, and samples have not even been collected! This was mostly due to other urgent projects, such as publishing a paper on transcriptomic immune response of sheep to a liver fluke infection (which I might mention on this blog as well!), and writing other grant applications that would allow me to continue working in UCD with my own funding. Once the project work started around June this year, the first things that needed to be completed was:
- An ethics approval – or in our case, an ethics exemption for working both with people and with animals, which were given by the college Human and Animal Research Ethics Committees
- A GDPR review – a lot of work has been done to conduct a risk assessment to make sure that the privacy of the participants and the personal data are protected. We consulted UCD Data Protection Office, and they reviewed our risk assessment, and gave helpful suggestions on improving data security, and the transparency of what we tell our study participants about their data.
- This project website :)
Now we are ready to go! Hopefully we will have 20 interested Labrador owners to work with soon, so that I can share the progress, and ultimately, the results of this study with you.
What you can expect from this page in the future:
- Updates on our work – recruiting study participants, collecting samples, extracting DNA, the analysis, and what we find
- Posts about the gut microbiome and the newest research, hopefully in an easy-to-understand way
- Hopefully, photos of the lovely dogs from our study, if the owners are happy to share them!