University of Delaware undergraduate student Blair Schneider spent time in Brazil earlier this year getting samples from chickens to help with research looking to see if there is something genetically that allows the Brazilian birds to better deal with heat stress than American broiler chickens.

The research is being led at UD by Carl Schmidt, professor and genome scientist in the Department of Animal and Food Sciences in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and is part of a five-year, $4.7 million National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) climate change grant for a project titled “Adapting Chicken Production to Climate Change Through Breeding,” which includes Iowa State University and North Carolina State University, as well.

With the researchers having previously sampled birds in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda, Schneider, a senior majoring in biological sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, said that the group wanted to look at South American chickens along the same equatorial line to see if there were any similarities with their African counterparts.

“We took blood samples and we’re going to get the genome sequenced to see what genes overlap between the African birds and the South American birds. We would hypothesize these [overlapping genes] are due to heat and heat stress or heat acclimation,” said Schneider.

If the researchers can identify those overlapping genes, they might be able to potentially breed beneficial genes into the modern broiler line in the face of heat waves.

To collect their samples, the researchers were guided by Matheus Reis, a postdoc at Sao Paulo State University (UNESP) in Jaboticabal, Brazil, who also spent a year at UD. Reis helped the researchers collect samples and connected them with a local farmer named Mário Irineu Salviato.

The farm at which Salviato worked had 150 different breeds of chicken and the researchers took 200 blood samples from a variety of different breeds, such as ones known as Brazilian Musicians because of how much they sing.