Diagnostics and improvement of udder health in future milk production systems
The overall objectives of this project are to 1) Identify factors influencing udder health of herds converting to automatic milking, 2) Improve methods for the detection of mastitic cows and pathogens and 3) Describe the lactational changes in surfactant protein D (SP-D) and phenotypic and genetic relationship between SP-D and mastitis.
The specific objectives are to:
Conc. 1
- Describe changes in infectious pathogens, management, hygiene, and milking technique of herds converting to automatic milking and suggest explanations for changes in udder health.
Conc. 2
- Implement and evaluate PCR-based identification of major mastitis pathogens.
- Identify causal bacterial pathogens in non-culturable secretion from cows with clinical mastitis.
- Examine DNA- and antibody-based methods for the direct detection of major bac-terial pathogens in mastitic milk.
- Discriminate between healthy and mastitic cows based on bacteriological culturing, cow cell count, visual appearance and CMT-score of foremilk, treatment of clinical mastitis, and fluctuations in milk yield.
- Calculate the genetic variation of the developed discriminatory diagnostic toolkit and compare results with existing methods based on cow cell count and treatment of clinical mastitis.
Conc. 3
- Produce monoclonal antibodies against bovine SP-D and establish and validate an assay for the analysis of surfactant protein D (SP-D) in plasma, serum and milk.The assay will be adapted to a high capacity system using an autoanalyser.
- Describe the effect of breed, stage of lactation and inflammation on SP-D, pheno-typic variation and relationship to udder health.
- Perform statistical genetic analysis of plasma SP-D concentrations and relate these to breeding values for clinical mastitis and somatic cell count (conventional trait) and to indicator values obtained from the new diagnostic toolkit developed in WP2.
Responsible: Senior scientist Morten Dam Rasmussen
Project period: 01.04.2003 - 31.12.2006
Partners: The National Committee on Cattle Husbandry (Danish Agricultural Advisory Centre), Danish Institute for Food and Veterinary Research
Last updated: Thursday 21 June 2007 - [email protected]
Tel: +45 8999 1900