The Vitamin D Animal Laboratory (VitDAL), led by Professor Richard Mellanby and based in the Roslin Institute and the Queen’s Medical Research Institute at the University of Edinburgh, brings together expertise in clinical veterinary endocrionology and nutrition, proteomics and immunology with the overarching ambition of advancing understanding of vitamin D biology in all species. The research of VitDAL explores the relationship between vitamin D, inflammation and health outcomes in companion, farm and wild animals. These studies run alongside mechanistic investigations in murine experimental disease models. This diverse, multi-species approach allows the lab to address key vitamin D research questions which would not be possible using a single species system.

The key aims of the VitDAL are :

• Provide an external diagnostic service measuring key vitamin D metabolites in clinical veterinary patients
• Advance understanding of the health benefits of vitamin D with a focus on non-skeletal tissues
• Undertake mechanistic studies which investigate how vitamin D modulates the immune response

Key recent achievements of the VitDAL include:

• Discovery that vitamin D metabolites influence dendritic cell function through the upregulation of CD31
• Discovery that total, but not free, 25(OH)D decreases transiently following elective surgery in dogs
• Identification that coat colour is associated with 25(OH)D status in African calves
• Discovery of relationship between maternal vitamin D status and subsequent birth weights of lambs in commercial sheep flocks
• Description of rickets in several commercial sheep flocks
• Development of novel LC-MS/MS methods to assess total 25(OH)D, free 25(OH)D and 3-epi-25(OH)D in companion animals
• Defining tissue expression of vitamin D receptor in the dog
• Identification of hypervitaminosis D syndromes in companion and zoological animals
• Identification of novel relationship between vitamin D status and reproductive fitness in wild sheep
• Identification that vitamin D status predicts mortality in hospitalised cats and in dogs with chronic enteropathies
• Discovering a negative relationship between vitamin D status and inflammation in dogs and cats 
• Establishing that 1,25(OH)₂D₃ can block active, but not passive, experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, a widely used murine model of multiple sclerosis
• Discovering that 1,25(OH)₂D₃ can dramatically influence the expression of co-stimulatory molecules, cytokine production and migratory behaviour of dendritic cells 
• Identification that sheep with dark coats have lower 25(OH)D₃, but not 25(OH)D₂ 
• Discovering a novel syndrome of marked hypovitaminosis D in dogs with a protein losing enteropathy 
• Demonstrating that dogs with atopic dermatitis and low vitamin D have poorer clinical responses to glucocorticoid therapy than vitamin D replete dogs

If you would like to contact the VitDAL please email Richard.Mellanby@ed.ac.uk