Impact of total and viable heifers' mammary gland secretion microbiota on the milk quality of the first 30 days of lactation

• Grant number: 19/25499-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Effective date (Start): March 01, 2020
• Effective date (End): February 28, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Agronomical Sciences - Veterinary Medicine - Animal Clinics and Surgery
• Principal Investigator: Alice Maria Melville Paiva Della Libera
• Grantee: Thalita Martins Domingues
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Medicina Veterinária e Zootecnia (FMVZ). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The production of dairy cattle in Brazil has been shown to expand in the last years, this is through the improvement of the sector through the use of artifacts that determines the increase of productivity what is beneficial to the best use of the animal's potential production. In this sense, infections such as mastitis, which cause glandular lesions and produce less, are important for the market that is meaningless to reduce losses and increase production. Thus, the importance of the study about the occurrence of mastitis, the main mammary gland infection, in heifers is latent and shows that it directly impacts the estimates of future levels of production for affecting the development of the glandular parenchyma and the investment that will be required to maintain this animal.Recently, studies have shown, through the use of techniques such as the microbiome, which consists in determining the prevalence rates of different bacterial species in samples, the presence of microbiota in the mammary gland that until then was considered sterile until postpartum, when the keratin tampon is lost. In addition, a presentation of heifers with mastitis reinforces the hypothesis that the mammary gland is not a sterile environment and that periods of immunosuppression, such as postpartum, can determine a dysbiosis - microbiota imbalance - capable of triggering mastitis, which will impact the quality of secreted milk, as infection-causing agents use milk components for energy, for example.Thus, the importance of knowledge about mammary gland microbiota is latent, since, with increasing occurrence of mastitis in heifers, production levels may fall, in addition to being associated with increased treatment costs and damage to animal welfare, factors which, together with an action of imbalanced bacteria, reduce the quality of milk supplied to the market. (AU)