Development of an innovative cow-side test for the diagnosis of subclinical mastitis in dairy cows

Mastitis (inflammation of the mammary gland) is recognized as the biggest threat to the health and productivity of dairy cows, and causes great economic damage in the production and processing of milk and dairy products. In most cases, only clinical mastitis is treated, while subclinical mastitis goes unnoticed causing great losses. While clinical mastitis is easy to detect in most cases, the subclinical form is a big problem on farms, so that the incidence in a herd can be from 2 to 20 times higher than the clinical form. According to some studies, subclinical mastitis represents approximately 90-95% of total mastitis cases, with a prevalence in herds of 15-75%. Detecting subclinical mastitis is difficult because clinical symptoms are not visible, udder and milk look normal, and the disease very often turns into a clinical form. A large number of somatic cells (BSS) results in a reduced amount of milk produced per cow (10-25%) and a reduction in milk fat by 5-12%. The project is focused on the detection, characterization and quantification of the proteomic profile of the milk of cows with subclinical mastitis, with the aim of applying advanced, innovative and state-of-the-art technologies in the development and creation of a new diagnostic test for subclinical mastitis. For this, it will be necessary to perform profiling of biomarkers for the differential diagnosis of mastitis using a quantitative “bottom-up” proteomic approach, to perform bioinformatic analysis of the collected data, biological validation of potential biomarkers, to produce appropriate antibodies, to produce multiple tests, and finally to adapt the validated biomarkers to the format of immunochromatographic tests.