Development of a Web-Based Agriculture Health Risk Assessment Tool for Military Veteran Farmers and Ranchers

In the U.S., significant health disparities exist among rural populations compared to their urban counterparts. These disparities can be compounded in agricultural workers due to the dangerous and unpredictable nature of their work. Agricultural producers who are also military Veterans may experience additional health pressures that are often overlooked in the healthcare setting. Over 2.5 million Veteran Health Administration (VHA) patients reside in rural areas and the healthcare infrastructure to care for these Veterans may not include an agricultural occupational approach. To address healthcare disparities in Veteran farmers and ranchers, this study, in collaboration with AgriSafe Network, will be used to develop a health risk assessment (HRA) that is specifically designed to be used by Veterans working in agriculture. The current AgriSafe AgHRA is an efficient tool in the clinical setting and provides basic responses to individual health risks. The AgHRA does not provide diagnoses and is not meant to replace visits to healthcare provider or screening exams; rather, it alerts the user on how to take risk-appropriate prevention steps. Qualitative interviews with rural health professionals were conducted to 1) gain a better understanding, from the perspective of rural healthcare professionals, regarding the healthcare needs of Veterans working in agriculture and 2) use information gained to create questions for an HRA tool that can be used by Veteran farmers and ranchers. Analysis of the interview data revealed the overarching themes to be healthcare accessibility, mental health conditions and chronic health conditions. Using these data and information from a literature search of Veteran-specific health questionnaires, AgriSafe Network will create a tailored HRA tool that will be accessible on their website

Meta-analysis identifies pleiotropic loci controlling phenotypic trade-offs in sorghum

Community association populations are composed of phenotypically and genetically diverse accessions. Once these populations are genotyped, the resulting marker data can be reused by different groups investigating the genetic basis of different traits. Because the same genotypes are observed and scored for a wide range of traits in different environments, these populations represent a unique resource to investigate pleiotropy. Here, we assembled a set of 234 separate trait datasets for the Sorghum Association Panel, a group of 406 sorghum genotypes widely employed by the sorghum genetics community. Comparison of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) conducted with two independently generated marker sets for this population demonstrate that existing genetic marker sets do not saturate the genome and likely capture only 35–43% of potentially detectable loci controlling variation for traits scored in this population. While limited evidence for pleiotropy was apparent in cross-GWAS comparisons, a multivariate adaptive shrinkage approach recovered both known pleiotropic effects of existing loci and new pleiotropic effects, particularly significant impacts of known dwarfing genes on root architecture. In addition, we identified new loci with pleiotropic effects consistent with known trade-offs in sorghum development. These results demonstrate the potential for mining existing trait datasets from widely used community association populations to enable new discoveries from existing trait datasets as new, denser genetic marker datasets are generated for existing community association populations