Happy New Year Vet Diagnosticians! I hope this finds you all well at the end of the Holiday Season and the start of 2022. I hope your Holidays were enjoyable and peaceful. There is something about Christmas trees that put me in a reflective mood. The lights? The ornaments?  The Season? Whatever it is, it happens every year for me. This year one evening, as I was staring at our living room Christmas tree, a flood of memories came my way as I focused on the tree top ornament … a small hand-made cardinal made of red wool, a bit faded over the years. In my mind I began to recall how it came into our possession. It was 1986, and we had just moved our family from my resident post in Baton Rouge to Brookings SD where I was a new Assistant Professor at the SDSU Veterinary Science Department and ADRDL. We moved into a small rental house near campus on Harvey Dunn Street, an easy walk to the laboratory. We soon discovered that two doors down were Dr. and Mrs. George S. Harshfield, retired Department Head and Lab Director from where I now worked. What a sweet couple. We first met during our nightly walks around the block with the kids, following supper. Dr. Harshfield, upon learning I was a pathologist getting ready for the ACVP board exams, took a great interest in my goal. He gave me some good advice, and even loaned me some study slide sets and an old microscope so I would not have to spend all my time studying up at the lab. Nurturing was among his natural character traits, and I will always remember his kindness. I later learned that he was a charter member of the American College of Veterinary Pathologists (ACVP). I was being nurtured by a visionary and was unaware at the time.

The dictionary defines nurture as: the process of caring for and encouraging the growth or development of someone or something. A simple word, yet it defines perfectly what the AAVLD stands for. We are the organization whose primary mission is to advance the growth and development of the discipline of veterinary diagnostic laboratory science; and we nurture the next generation of vet diagnosticians. We have and will continue to do this successfully through many avenues. We could not do it without you our members and our many volunteer leaders. Thank you for being engaged with AAVLD and contributing to our nurturing culture.

To finish the story, that Christmas season our family was invited in for cookies at the Harshfield house. Our young kids were quite impressed with all the little red birds in their Christmas tree… a whole flock of cardinals perched in the branches (each hand-made by Mrs. Harshfield). As we left, Mrs. Harshfield took a bird from the tree and pressed it into my young son’s hand saying, “I think this one would like a new home in your tree”. And there he has perched every Christmas since.  She too was a nurturer.

The University of Kentucky VDL in Lexington KY has recently launched a New Pathogen Discovery Laboratory (NPDL) as an extension to our Molecular Biology laboratory. Dr. Erdal Erol, our Head of Diagnostic Microbiology, is the director of the lab. The NPDL is in 1000 sq ft of fully renovated vacant laboratory space at UKVDL.

The lab is now developing and validating Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) and metagenomics methods to help identify new and emerging pathogens that are causing diseases in animals. We are excited to announce that we have recruited an Investigational Biologist, Dr. Litty Paul, to oversee this project. She brings valuable experience from her role as a Senior Laboratory Specialist in the Department of Pathology and Molecular Infectious Disease Laboratories at the University of Utah School of Medicine. Over the next three years, the NPDL will enable UKVDL to offer new advanced diagnostic test methods for our clients to aid in animal disease diagnosis.

Dr. Jane Christopher-Hennings will retire from the South Dakota State University Animal Disease Research and Diagnostic Laboratory at the end of January. She was Head of the SDSU Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences Department as well as Director of the ADRDL for the past 8 years.

Dr. Angela Pillatzki will be the Interim South Dakota State University Veterinary & Biomedical Sciences Department Head and SD Animal Disease Research & Diagnostic Laboratory Director starting Feb. 1^st, 2022.

Dr. Colin Parrish from Cornell University gave a presentation on canine influenza virus and canine & feline parvoviruses as examples to explain how to detect and characterize canine and feline viruses using conventional tools and the state-of-the-art technologies. Dr. Ganwu Li from Iowa State University shared experiences on next-generation sequencing and how this technology can be applied in veterinary diagnostic labs to identity novel viruses in different host species (e.g., swine, equine, white-tailed deer, and poultry, etc.). Dr. Jianqiang Zhang from Iowa State University presented the strategies to better detect and monitor emerging and re-emerging swine viruses. These strategies include but are not limited to 1) development and optimization of diagnostic assays, 2) evolution of specimens for better surveillance testing, 3) improvement of laboratory operation procedure to meet high throughput testing needs, and 4) big diagnostic data sharing for efficiently monitoring swine viruses. Dr. Phillip Gauger from Iowa State University spoke about web-based tools (ISU FLUture and ISU PRRSView) to streamline the data analysis and better serve VDL clients. Dr. Douglas Gladue from USDA Foreign Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory discussed the need for and challenges of classical methods in combination with newer diagnostic methods to culture emerging veterinary viruses (e.g., African swine fever virus) for better characterization of the virus and for vaccine development.

The 33^rd year of JVDI was successful – we published our full allotment of 1,200 pages, which included 177 items: 4 reviews, 54 full scientific reports, 95 brief reports, 2 commentaries, 3 editorials, and 2 special issues (Next-generation sequencing, Laboratory data enhancement – 19 articles). As a precursor to going on-line-only in January 2022, we published our first full-issue cover-to-cover PDF in November 2021. As described in our November editorial (Maxie G, et al. JVDI goes green: online-only publication for AAVLD members as of January 2022. J Vet Diagn Invest 2021; 33:1035-1038 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10406387211050758 ), the decision to go online-only is in line with the trend in industry practices – we thereby reduce the number of trees harvested, reduce manufacturing chemicals, use less water, and use less energy to produce or ship print copies.

Email alerts will be sent to members by the AAVLD office when each bimonthly issue of JVDI is published, with a reminder email one month later. Access to full articles is a member benefit that is available by entry through the AAVLD website www.aavld.org – otherwise, access to full articles is embargoed to non-members and non-subscribers for 12 months after publication. We also encourage everyone interested in immediate notification of our publications to sign up with SAGE, our JVDI publisher, for email alerts of individual articles as they are published on OnlineFirst, which occurs in the months preceding the publication of the compiled bimonthly Journal. Please see the editorial for details.

We look forward to member feedback on the evolution of the Journal.

Margaret Steinman, University of Kentucky

Sai Narayanan, Oklahoma State University

Daniela Pena Hernandez, Purdue University

Ryan Yanez, Michigan State University

You might have noticed you received a print copy of the January issue from JVDI. SAGE Publishing informed us there was an update missed from the fulfillment team and this is a one-off. Going forward, as previously communicated, the journal will be available online only for AAVLD members. Please do not hesitate to reach out to AAVLD or SAGE if you have any questions or concerns.

J Vet Diagn Invest 2022;34(1). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10406387211053254

Abstract. Mycoplasma bovis, the most important primary pathogen in the family Mycoplasmataceae, causes pneumonia, arthritis, otitis media, and mastitis in cattle. Histopathologic pulmonary changes associated with M. bovis infection have been characterized as suppurative-to-caseonecrotic bronchopneumonia; infection in other organs has been reported in only a few studies that examined caseonecrotic endocarditis and suppurative meningitis. Granulomatous lesions associated with M. bovis infection have been reported only rarely. We studied the granulomatous inflammation associated with M. bovis infection in several organs of 21 Japanese Black cattle. M. bovis was detected by isolation and loop-mediated isothermal amplification methods; other bacteria were detected using culture on 5% blood sheep agar and a MALDI-TOF MS Biotyper. Tissues were examined by histopathology and by immunohistochemistry (IHC) using anti–M. bovis, anti-Iba1, anti-iNOS, and anti-CD204 antibodies. All 21 cases, which included 2 cases of meningitis-meningoencephalitis, 8 cases of endocarditis, and 11 cases of bronchopneumonia, had caseonecrotic granulomatous inflammation associated with M. bovis infection. The IHC for macrophages revealed a predominance of iNOS-labeled (M1) macrophages in the inner layer of the caseonecrotic granulomas associated with meningitis-meningoencephalitis, endocarditis, and bronchopneumonia in Japanese Black cattle naturally infected with M. bovis.

Figure 1. Representative gross lesions in the brain, heart, and lung of cattle with Mycoplasma bovis infection. A. White 2.0 × 1.5 cm nodule (asterisk) on the right side of the pons. B. A caseous nodule (asterisk) on the endocardial surface of the left atrium. C. All lung lobes have diffusely distributed nodules. The cut surface of the lung has white-to-yellow caseous material in the lung parenchyma (asterisk). H = heart.

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