Measuring inflammation in cattle: building a comprehensive diagnostic panel

Acute and chronic inflammation in dairy cows can reduce milk production, impair fertility and increase disease risk. Current diagnostic methods are insufficient to assess bovine inflammation, which hampers progress in testing strategies to improve immune dysfunction and guide appropriate management therapies. We aim to develop a comprehensive platform to measure two types of proteins important in understanding bovine inflammation: cytokines, which regulate immune response in cows, and acute phase proteins, which increase in concentration when inflammation or infection is present. 

Our lab has been working to create a simple, reliable diagnostic panel to measure and understand bovine inflammation. With this award, we have made significant progress in understanding how to measure three acute phase proteins: 

• Haptoglobin, which indicates inflammation or infection. We produced a recombinant haptoglobin protein and purified the protein from bovine serum. We developed clones that can detect natural haptoglobin in bovine serum samples.
• Serum Amyloid A (SAA), which measures inflammation and is used in disease diagnosis. We successfully produced a recombinant version of this protein. We developed 12 clones, but they were unable to recognize native SAA in bovine samples. Future research should explore the role of antibodies in clone binding and the pre-treatment of serum to make the protein accessible during assay testing.
• Procalcitonin (PCT), an inflammation marker especially important in diagnosing mastitis. Identification of the correct genetic sequencing for PCT was challenging. Repeated efforts to develop recombinant versions of this protein were unsuccessful, and we decided not to pursue this target any further in this project due to the time-consuming and costly process of protein production.