Part three of the podcast series from the 2022 Tri-State Dairy Nutrition Conference is Dr. Eric Ciappio’s presentation about the importance of choline in prenatal human nutrition. Dr. Ciappio is with Balchem Corporation.
Guest: Dr. Eric Ciappio, Balchem Corporation
Part three of the podcast series from the 2022 Tri-State Dairy Nutrition Conference is Dr. Eric Ciappio’s presentation about the importance of choline in prenatal human nutrition. Dr. Ciappio is with Balchem Corporation.
Dr. Ciappio begins with an overview of one of the main roles of choline in the body: supporting overall brain health and cognitive function, primarily through its role as a precursor to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. (3:20)
Eric then reviews several key pieces of research from the literature, beginning with a prospective cohort study looking at choline intake of the mother during pregnancy and the visual-spatial memory of their child seven years later. Moms who were in the highest quartiles of choline intake were correlated with significant improvement in visual-spatial memory of their children measured seven years later. (5:45)
Researchers at Cornell investigated two levels of choline supplementation for pregnant women during the second and third trimester. One group received low choline, 25 milligrams, or 550 milligrams a day of choline, slightly more than the daily recommended intake for pregnant women. Women in the high choline group had higher blood choline throughout the experiment and that increased choline was also observed in cord blood at delivery. (6:48)
Another Cornell study compared two groups of pregnant women, one who received approximately the recommended daily intake for choline and one who received roughly twice the recommended daily intake of choline during the third trimester. These were achieved through a controlled diet prepared in a metabolic kitchen plus supplemental choline. Once babies were delivered, cognitive testing was performed regularly from four months to 13 months. Babies born to mothers who consumed the higher dietary choline level had significantly faster visual processing speed compared to those born to the lower dietary group of women. Additionally, the number of days of prenatal exposure to choline was actually significantly associated with a faster reaction time, even within the lower choline intake group. (8:39)
These same children were followed up at seven years of age with no additional intervention and subjected to a sustained attention test. Children born to the high choline-supplemented group of women had a significantly higher score overall on the sustained attention test. The beneficial effects of maternal choline supplementation during the third trimester of pregnancy are still present at age seven. (14:46)
Choline also has a second important role in lipid metabolism, primarily to help generate phosphocholine and phosphatidylcholine which play both structural and functional roles: a structural component in the overall cell membranes and helps to transport specific lipids throughout the body. In particular, choline is critical for DHA transport. DHA is critical for maternal nutrition, as it is implicated in reduction of risk of preterm birth and overall support of the development of the eye and the brain (19:54)
In the study with 25 vs 550 milligrams of choline supplementation during the second and third trimesters (6:46), the researchers also supplemented the two groups with DHA. Supplementation with choline plus DHA during pregnancy improved DHA status better than just supplementing with DHA alone. (22:48)
In large dietary intake surveys of choline across the United States, just 6% of adult women in the United States get enough choline in their diet. Less than one in 20 pregnant women are getting enough choline in their diet relative to the daily recommended intake. Reviewers of the dietary guidelines showed that many prenatal supplements do not contain choline or only contain small amounts inadequate to meet recommendations. Similar observations have been reported worldwide. Furthermore, DHA inadequacy is common in pregnant and lactating women. (24:11)
Dr. Ciappio concludes his presentation with the reminder that choline is an essential nutrient that helps support the growth and development of the brain and supports brain health throughout the lifespan. Despite these benefits, just 4% of pregnant women in the United States get enough choline in their diet. Expert groups are calling on manufacturers to increase the amount of choline in prenatal supplements. (26:25)
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Scott (00:07):
Good evening everyone, and welcome to the Real Science Exchange, the pubcast where leading scientists and industry professionals meet over a few drinks to discuss the latest ideas and trends in animal nutrition. Hi, I'm Scott Sorrell. I'll be your host here this evening and as always, I'm joined by the lovely and talented Dr. Clay Zimmerman. Clay, great to see you here again.
Clay Zimmerman (00:28):
Good to see you, Scott. Thanks.
Scott (00:29):
Alright tonight we'll continue our miniseries of lectures presented at the 2022 Tri-State Nutrition Conference titled, exploring in Utero Influences on Transgenerational Performance. Last week, we aired the second podcast in the series of four, which featured Dr. Jimena LaPorta from the University of Wisconsin. Her talk was titled Phenotypic and Molecular Signatures of Fetal Hypothermia. If you missed that one, you're gonna want to go back and listen to it. This week we're highlighting Dr. Eric Ciappio from The Balchem Corporation, and his title is The Growing Importance of Choline in Prenatal Human Nutrition. Clay, can you give us some highlights of what our friends can expect to hear during this presentation?
Speaker 3 (01:14):
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Clay Zimmerman (01:36):
Yeah, certainly. So, you know, I always enjoy hearing presentations from other species aside, just, you know, just, just from dairy cows, there's a lot we can learn there and vice versa. Biochem in particular, has sponsored a lot of, a lot of human choline research particularly in this area of prenatal development. So they will hear a lot about that, about how choline can affect brain health really throughout our whole lifetime, including, you know, prenatally. So you're gonna hear a lot about choline and brain health, cognitive choline and cognitive function and how choline regulates gene expression in the brain. So there's some really interesting research that we've helped sponsor through the years looking at prenatal choline supplementation.
Scott (02:31):
Thanks, clay. Sounds interesting. Let's now go to Dr. Eric Ciappio,
Dr. Ciappio (02:38):
Everyone for joining me, and thank you for indulging us. So Scott had kicked things off today by asking why a human nutrition person is here at an animal health conference, and the answer is, is threats of violence. Scott is a very scary man, so he forced me to come. But no, I am super happy to reach across the aisle to my, to my friends in the animal health side. I think it's super interesting hearing kind of what the other half of the business is up to, and hopefully you all feel the same way. I'm gonna talk about choline and its role in prenatal health and nutrition overall. So choline is something of our flagship product. Over on the human nutrition and health side of Balchem and choline. You can really divide choline jobs really into two big buckets, the first of which is supporting overall brain health and cognitive function.
Dr. Ciappio (03:22):
So, really can think of this in three specific ways from a mechanistic perspective. Number one is by maintaining cell membrane integrity, allowing the physical structure of the neurons to be properly built, as it were by regulating phospholipid and metabolism. We'll go into a little bit more detail on that in a bit by helping to support overall nervous system function by serving as a precursor for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, right? Can't spell or can't spell acetylcholine without choline. And there's a reason for that is the key structural component of that which allows the specific function of both cholinergic neurons in the brain to function properly. And third, probably what I think is most on theme, certainly for today's sessions, is it helps to regulate gene expression in key areas of the brain that are responsible in part for mood, memory and attention, right? We know this from a variety of animal health or laboratory animal-based studies.
Dr. Ciappio (04:12):
There have been no shortage and most of them generally will show a variety of behavioral outcomes, which fall into the main bucket of either visual spatial memory or sustained detention. Overall, this has been shown in a number of different animal trials and primarily laboratory models such as mice, rats, et cetera. So generally speaking, when you look at the mechanism for this, that tends to fall on the same basic story which I'll sort of run through. Number one is that, of course, your choline comes into your body, particularly at a very, a vulnerable time, namely during pregnancy and development. That choline being part of the one carbon metabolism cycle, it's going to impact overall d n a methylation, whichever gene that is, depends on what your pet gene of interest is. That gene then has changes in overall gene expression which can be related to specific nervous system functions such as memory and learning, et cetera.
Dr. Ciappio (05:05):
This has larger more macro effects such as alterations in cellular proliferation, changes in neurogenesis, changes in apoptosis, et cetera, all of which change the overall function of the neuron, right? This can change acetylcholine release. This can alter specific neural pathways involved in memory. And ultimately how this manifests for you or I, and something that you would notice or care about generally, again, falls into one of three big buckets. Cognition excuse me, attention, memory and learning, right? And so how do we know this? Well, first and foremost, you can see this from large cohort studies. So this is a neat example of a cohort, prospective cohort study where they took mother and child pairs and they looked at the amount of choline that mom was taking in particularly during pregnancy, and they looked seven years later at what was happening to her offspring.
Dr. Ciappio (05:55):
And you can see that among moms who were in the highest quintiles excuse me, quartiles of choline intake, you can see significant improvement in visual-spatial memory measured seven years later. Again, corollary data, nevertheless, still pretty interesting that in effect from mom's developmental or from baby's developmental period during mom's gestation still has a cognitive impact even seven years later. So, let's dig into that again, causal or association data's great, but we need some causal data to really try and make some serious conclusions here. So first step in that mechanism was, is that choline that mom is taking in actually bioavailable, is it actually impacting her choline status? Believe it or not, this is actually the first time this was ever shown. This is data from Cornell University, which the team at Alchem had supplied material for this did use our vital choline material, this is our choline chloride.
Dr. Ciappio (06:47):
And what we did here, or what the group in Cornell did here was they took a group of pregnant women and they divided them to one of two dietary groups. One was receiving low choline, right? 25 milligrams, effectively zero choline. They had to include some, because there was some radio labeling data that was included, which I'm not gonna go into but effectively zero choline or 550 milligrams a day of choline, which is slightly more than the DRL for pregnant women. And they measured this, or they provided the supplemental choline for about 24 to 28 weeks. So basically the last two trimesters of pregnancy. And what they were really looking for here was markers of choline status. Lo and behold, what do you see? You do see, in fact, just what you would expect. You see that plasma choline and other related such markers do significantly increase rather quickly during gestation.
Dr. Ciappio (07:36):
And this is actually sustained up until delivery. This is a cord blood measurement too. So you can see that status among both mom and baby is significantly improved by choline supplementation. Now, the reason I think that is interesting is because, a, it does demonstrate that T choline is bioavailable in pregnant women, but b, the reason I think that's that's notable is because generally speaking, in human supplementation trials, particularly for pregnant women, you tend to take, not you, we tend to take data for other groups, which tend to be men between the ages of 18 and 25, and just sort of assume that it's generalizable to everybody else. Now, pregnancy is not just like some passing fad. I mean, it's obviously a change that's rather significant from a physiological perspective. So the fact that this was demonstrated in this specific group, I think is quite notable.
Dr. Ciappio (08:21):
And in fact, it's actually the first time this is ever shown. This is data that was published just around Thanksgiving of last year. So that's all fine and well, now let's look at some specific outcomes right now that we know that we can actually change mom and by extension baby's choline status, how does this impact on a behavioral level? Let's take a look at another study. This is published again, another group from Cornell. Couple years ago. What we did here was they took a group of pregnant women and they divided them into one of two different dietary intakes. Either a quote unquote low choline diet, which is actually pretty much the DRI for choline 480 milligrams a day. This came from a combination of both controlled diets. So basically they came into volunteers, came into a metabolic kitchen and received a series of prepared meals every day, right?
Dr. Ciappio (09:08):
Which is a lot for pregnant women, right? To come in every single day or every single, I think week actually and receive regular meals containing a set amount of choline in addition to some supplemental choline, right? So the total of that was 480 milligrams a day. We also had a higher choline intake group. Again, same controlled feeding diet that was prepared in the metabolic kitchen, plus 550 milligrams of choline. So for a total of 930. And really what this is trying to model is basically DRI level intake, or twice the DRI intake of colon, right? So they fed this throughout the last trimester of pregnancy, and once baby arrived, whenever he or she decided to arrive cognitive testing was reformed on the baby. So no additional supplementation happened once birth occurred, right? So nothing baby effectively got nothing right after he or she was born.
Dr. Ciappio (10:01):
This is only measuring the impact of the exposure during development. Cognitive testing was performed regularly from four months to about 13 months. And so the logical question here that most of you have, or at least that I certainly had, was how exactly do you measure cognitive function in infants? I will show you. So they use a test, which is called a visually guided reactive SoCo. And what that means, we'll give you kind of a mock example of this here, using my subpar PowerPoint skills, is that an image would flash up on screen regularly and there'd be a camera on top of the monitor, right? And that camera would track the baby's eyes and how quickly it took his or her eyes to zoom over to that specific image as it popped up on screen.
Dr. Ciappio (10:47):
So this is a measure of what's called information processing speed, effectively as the name would imply, the amount of time it takes for the information to process or to happen up on screen for your brain to register it and then send a signal back to your eyes to move over to it, right? And this is important because it's reflective of, or predictive of rather information processing speed later on in childhood, but also childhood iq. So what do you see across the board? You see that kids who were born to the higher choline consuming mothers had a significantly lower reaction time. They reacted faster to those visual stimuli, right? Suggesting that they had a faster information, information processing speed compared to those born to local and consuming moms, right? So in other words, put simply choline supplementation among women during the third trimester pregnancy, improved information processing speed in their children.
Dr. Ciappio (11:40):
What's even more interesting, I think in this study is when they looked at the subset of kids in the lower choline intake group, again, 430 milligrams is effectively the DRI level. What you'll see in a bit that's, that's quite a far ask for, I think the large majority of women in the United States. The dietary intake of choline gen tends to be quite a bit lower. So when they look at the amount of time that the kids were exposed to this higher, relatively higher colon intake, even though it was lower within the context of the study because of course, baby doesn't come on a set schedule, baby comes when he or she wants to, right? So certain kids were exposed more than others. You can see that the number of days of prenatal exposure to choline was actually significantly associated with a faster reaction time, even within the lower choline intake group. So even just more exposure to a relatively higher choline environment still significantly improves overall reaction time. So what the authors concluded here was that quote, even modest increases in typical maternal choline intake during pregnancy would be beneficial for infant information processing speed with possible long-term benefits for offspring cognition throughout life.
Scott (12:52):
Clay, the Cornell research on infant cognition is, fascinating to me. What are some of the key takeaways for you from that research? And does it have any implications for animal nutrition?
Clay Zimmerman (13:04):
Well, yeah, I think, I think there are a lot of ties here potentially between, you know, the human prenatal work and, and animals. So first of all you know, the latest research was looking at, you know, supplementing pregnant women the last, the last trimester of pregnancy with higher levels of choline. And you know, what they found in that was in infants, you know, improved reaction times and, you know, increased processing speed in those infants. And then they followed that up. Actually, they've monitored these, you know, these children that were born now out through seven years of age and you know, at seven years of age an improvement in sustained attention in those seven year olds. So they're, you know, there's really a lot to learn here as far as cognitive function in kids. And certainly there are, there are a lot of applications to that on the animal side.
Scott (14:13):
All right, very well, thank you for that, clay. If you'd like to view Dr. Ciappio’s full webinar and slides, go to balchem.com/realscience. Scroll down to April 27th, 2022. The title you'll see there is the 2022 Tri-State Dairy Nutrition Pre-Conference symposium, exploring in utero influences on transgenerational performance. If I click that link, you'll see all four of the pre presentations there available to you, and you'll be able to pick which one that you'd like to view,
Dr. Ciappio (14:43):
Right? So that brings us to the next study. Now, this is all fine and well, that's great. And you're probably saying to yourself, well Eric this is a study of 13 month old kids. Does this really translate? Is this impact really going to be there as the kid grows up? So I point you to this latest study. This actually came out just from Christmas time of last year, and this is a seven year follow up with those same kids. So what they did in this study was same exact cohort from before, no additional choline supplementation, effectively nothing else has happened. We let them sort of go on and do their thing and then followed up seven years later. So now the kids are seven years old, no additional intervention has occurred. So we're still measuring the impact of that prenatal exposure from seven years prior.
Dr. Ciappio (15:31):
And now what they're looking at, the primary endpoint here was what's called sustained attention. And so what does that mean? So a sustained detention task is basically, as the name would imply, measuring the ability of, of this subject to pay attention over a given time. And how do you measure that? Well, they use the sustained attention task test, SAT, the other SAT I guess. And so the way this works is there's something of a monitoring interval where the kids sit in front of a computer and they have to sit idle for a second or two. So they're not just jamming on the keyboard sort of mindlessly, right? They're seven year old. They're seven year old kids. So that is probably a group that is, is prone to hyperactivity. So basically one of two things happens. There's what's called a signal or nons signal event.
Dr. Ciappio (16:10):
Basically something flashes up on screen, then it goes away and it'll flash up for varying amounts of time, either 17, 29 or 50 milliseconds, right? Basically the faster it is, the harder it is to sort of note that, that that flashed up on screen goes away. There's an auditory response queue, basically a beep, right? And then the kids have to say, did you hear a beep? Yes or no? Did you see a flash? Yes or no? And they get feedback, you got it right, you got it wrong, eh? Yes, right now it's something of a red herring. I think the way I like to think of this test is it's not necessarily an ability of the child to see a flash on screen. This isn't a visual test, it's not an auditory test. We're not testing their hearing quality. What you're testing is the ability to play what is effectively the world's most boring video game for 12 minutes, right?
Dr. Ciappio (16:59):
Again, 12 minutes to a seven year old is an eternity, right? So again, you're looking at the ability of them to maintain their performance and their ability to do this test for an extended period of time. And they basically broke this up into three blocks, which you could think of as like three periods in a hockey games. Alright? So what happened, you can see that here, kids born again to the colon supplemented group, they have not had any additional intervention for seven full years, right? Had a significantly higher score overall on the sustained detention test. That to me isn't the most interesting part. What is interesting, it's when you sort of break that out over time, and you can see that when you look across these three periods, right? Again, three periods in a hockey game, right? You can see that in the beginning all the kids did just about the same. Really no difference. But what happens is the kids that were born to low choline consuming mothers had a significantly different or significantly lower score on this test as time progressed indicating that their attention or their ability to maintain their focus on this given task was decreasing over time. Whereas the kids born to the higher choline consuming mothers, basically their performance remained flat in neither, which is exactly what you want.
Dr. Ciappio (18:15):
Now, again, remember I said there was kind of an easy medium or hard mode, right? Again, it's a video game. So you have to think about it like there's sort of easy mode, medium hard, right? Again, that's indicated by the amount of time that visual signal flashed up on screen, right? The longer it flashes, the easier it is to recognize, right? So what you see here is that particularly on the shortest interval, the 17 seconds, so the hard mode, you see a significant decrease in the ability of those children born to the local and consuming mothers to maintain their attention on the task, right? On easy tasks. It was not so much different on the hard ones is really where you see it. And it's kind of a stepwise progression, although it was only statistically significant in the highest group, right? High choline consuming or kids born to the high choline consuming moms, their performance again maintained flattened even across.
Dr. Ciappio (19:05):
So what do we conclude here? The beneficial effects of maternal colon supplementation even just only during that pregnancy period are still present at eight seven. And what the authors concluded here, and the reason this is important is because sustained attention and attentional control more broadly contributes to a wide variety of higher cognitive functions such as problem solving and working memory and is overall positively associated with school performance. Plus anecdotally, I mean we live in a time now where our attention is probably the largest commodity in the world, right? When you think of how social networks work and all this, I mean, it's being able to maintain your attention on a given complex task is I think a skill that's only gonna become more important as time goes on.
Dr. Ciappio (19:47):
So what else? Alright, what else can choline do for me if I'm an expecting mom? Now, choline also has a second set of jobs, which I had alluded to before. It supports what's called overall lipid metabolism. So really choline, another job that it has is to help generate phosphocholine and phosphatidylcholine plays both structural and functional roles. Again, as I said before, is a structural component in the overall cell membranes, but also helps to transport specific lipids throughout the body. And that's why in part choline deficiency can result in organ damage in overall dysfunctional lipid metabolism.
Dr. Ciappio (20:22):
So if you recall that bioavailability study from the very beginning I kind of kept some data from you, I apologize. What I'll show you is that in fact plasma phosphatidylcholine does significantly increase overall with choline supplementation in this group. And so why might that be important? Why might a mom care so much about maintaining normal living metabolism during pregnancy? There's another class of specific lipids that a lot of women care about during pregnancy, namely omega three fatty acids. Now there's three of them generally speaking in human nutrition that you will talk about two of which I think are arguably the more important of the three, namely EPA and DHA. And they're named so because they have a double bond lithium omega three position, third from the end, DHA in particular of those has gotten a lot of notoriety, particularly during the pregnancy and, and gestational period because DHA is a structural key structural component of both the brain and the retina.
Dr. Ciappio (21:27):
And so having adequate amounts of DHA during pregnancy is incredibly important during pregnancy. And so what you see is that there are no shortage of authoritative recommendations for DHA intake during pregnancy. There's a lot of specific benefits for ranging from the reduction of risk of preterm birth to overall supporting the development of the eye in the brain. In fact, actually just just recently, just December the Australian authorities actually just increased their recommendation for DHA intake for expecting moms to 800 milligrams a day. So that's quite a bit higher than most of the other global recommendations. DHA currently doesn't have an actual DRI from the Institute of Medicine right now, but that is something that's supposedly going to be up for evaluation soon. Alright, so I thought this was a choline talk.
Dr. Ciappio (22:13):
Why are we talking about DHA? Well, choline and inter and DHA do have a pretty strong interaction, namely CHO'S job. Part of its job is to help transport lipids throughout the body, and that does include DHA in order for DHA to get packaged into AVLDL and then circulated throughout the body. It needs choline in order to do that. So you can think of choline as sort of the Uber driver that is taking DHA to its destination, right? So the question here becomes, if we did add more choline into the diet, would we actually increase overall DHA status? So if you were an eagle eye viewer before, since I've flashed this slide up, I think this is the third time you may have noticed that DHA was added into that experimental into the experimental diet for both different crews, right?
Dr. Ciappio (23:01):
The same amount. So here you've got DHA plus, effectively negligible choline or DHA plus 550 milligrams a day of choline. What happens to marketing DHA status? So these data we're actually just not just semi-recently submitted, so I can only show you a little bit, but exactly what you expect would happen is that you do see a significant improvement in overall DHA status of mom just by virtue of including choline along with the DHA same amount of DHA only difference was the choline in the diet. So what you can see is that supplementation with t choline during pregnancy increases not only markers of choline status, but supplementation with vital choline plus DHA during pregnancy increases DHA status better than just supplementing with DHA alone.
Dr. Ciappio (23:52):
So with all of these benefits of DHA or of choline and DHA, I would imagine that men and women across the country are just clamoring to get all the choline they can and they're eating enough and everyone's getting enough. And this is really kind of a non-pro. Unfortunately, you would be wrong. If you look at large dietary intake surveys of choline across the United States, you can see that just 6% of adult women in the United States get enough choline in their diet. Man, I can tell you're not doing all that much better. So don't get too smug during pregnancy, the numbers are even lower. Less than one in 20 pregnant women are getting enough choline in their diet relative to the DRI. Not even, it's really not even close either. If you look at major authoritative recommendations, the dietary guidelines just came out semi-recently in 2020.
Dr. Ciappio (24:44):
And what the reviewers of the dietary guidelines showed or stated was that quote, many prenatal supplements do not contain choline or only contain small amounts inadequate to meet recommendations. Generally what you see is that they'll have 55 to 110 milligrams per serving, which is 10 to 20% of the daily value. Dietary guidelines aren't the only group that has made statements to this effect. The American Medical Association is calling for evidence-based amounts of choline and all prenatal vitamins. And the American Academy of Pediatrics calls choline a key nutrient that supports neurodevelopment and pushes physicians and pediatricians to advocate for the inclusion of more choline and proper nutrition and maternal and early childhood diets. And this is not just a US specific problem. You can see these data in various global surveys of dietary intake In Canada, nearly 87% of pregnant women are not getting enough choline in their diets. My wife is Canadian, so I take any opportunity I can to dunk on Canada just generally speaking. And it says, given the importance of choline and pregnancy, further research to consider the inclusion of pre in prenatal supplements as warranted in Europe. Same story across the eu. You can see the choline intake is generally speaking lower than the recommendation
Dr. Ciappio (26:04):
DHA sim. Very similar story in the United States. Here you can see that while there, again, there's no one specific number. Experts generally recommend between two and 300 milligrams a day of DHA. You can see the dietary intake surveys show that the amount of DHA consumed by pregnant and lactating women and non-pregnant women is well below that number. So once we conclude, choline is an essential nutrient that helps support the growth and development of the brain and supports brain health throughout the lifespan. We've shown here in our recent data that supplemental vit choline is bioavailable and expecting mothers.
Dr. Ciappio (26:42):
We've shown that maternal vi vit choline supplementation provides significant brain health to Ben to baby, namely improving cognitive processing speeds in the infant, improving sustained attention even at eight seven, and improving overall attentional control. At eight seven maternal vit choline plus DHA supplementation improves DHA status better than DHA alone. And and despite all these benefits, just 4% of pregnant women in the United States get enough choline in their diet. And that's why expert groups are calling on manufacturers to increase the amount of choline and prenatal supplements, which is why Vita Choline provides innovative be benefits for mom and baby in public health.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
Tonight's last call question is brought to you by NitroShure Precision Release nitrogen. NitroShure delivers a complete TMR for the room and microbiome helping you feed the microbes that feed your cows. To learn more about maximizing microbial protein output while reducing your carbon footprint, visit balcom.com/nitroshure,
Scott (27:47):
Clay, as always, it's been a treat having you here in the co-pilot seat and to our loyal listeners be sure to look for the next podcast in the series next week when we'll feature Dr. Pete Hanssen from the University of Florida, and he's gonna be talking about methyl donors and epigenetic regulation of the early embryo. As always, thank you for joining us here tonight for the conversation. We hope you learn something. We hope you had fun, and we hope to see you next time here at the Real Science Exchange where it's always happy hour and you're always among friends.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
We'd love to hear your comments or ideas for topics and guests. So please reach out via email to anh.marketing at chem.com with any suggestions and we'll work hard to add them to the schedule. Don't forget to leave a five star rating on your way out. You can request your Real Science Exchange t-shirt in just a few easy steps, just like or subscribe to the Real Science Exchange. And send us a screenshot along with your address and t-shirt size to anh.marketing at balchem.com. Balchem’s real science lecture series of webinars continues with ruminant focused topics on the first Tuesday of every month, monogastric focused topics on the second Tuesday of each month, and quarterly topics for the companion animal segment. Visit balchem.com/realscience to see the latest schedule and to register for upcoming webinars.