• Robert Serfass, Iowa State food and nutrition researcher and current food science and human nutrition professor, was busy conducting research in 1989 that pointed to zinc deficiencies, which carried potential health risks.

“This is something happening in the United States, not just in developing countries with poor diets,” Serfass said about his research at the time.

Zinc deficiencies have been linked to birth defects and miscarriages according to the study. Serfass said zinc is vital for growth and development. He studied zinc absorption from foods fed to infants, children, women and men.

Severe deficiencies also have been linked to rashes and growth retardation in males and females alike.

One of his key discoveries was that zinc added to dairy products and zinc that occurs naturally are absorbed at a similar rate by infants and adult women.

• In 1995, ISU researchers were targeting microbes to help them learn more about the spread of antibiotic resistance to the environment.

The researchers studied how a bacterium in livestock manure may transfer antibiotic resistance to a soil microbe, noting that once in the soil, antibiotic resistance may spread to other organisms, following the food chain from plants to animals to humans.

Robert Andrews, a microbiologist for the study and current associate professor of microbial, immunology and preventive medicine in agriculture, believed that this posed potential problems for controlling animal and human diseases.

The research was conducted with the belief that genes hitch a ride to other organisms on a transposon, which is a piece of genetic material that can move around in or between cells.

—The material for this column was compiled from annual reports from the College of Agriculture by Daily reporter Dan A. Farmer.