Peptidomic analysis of healthy and subclinically mastitic bovine milk

A variety of proteases release hundreds of endogenous peptide fragments from intact bovine milk proteins. Mass spectrometry-based peptidomics allows for high throughput sequence assignment of a large number of these peptides. Mastitis is known to result in increased protease activity in the mammary gland. Therefore, we hypothesized that subclinically mastitic milks would contain higher concentrations of released peptides. In this work, milks were sampled from three cows and, for each, one healthy and one subclinically mastitic teat were sampled for milk. Peptides were analyzed by nano-liquid chromatography quadrupole time of flight tandem mass spectrometry and identified with database searching. In total, 682 peptides were identified. The total number of released peptides increased 146% from healthy to subclinically mastitic milks (p <0.05), and the total abundance of released peptides also increased significantly (p <0.05). Bioinformatic analysis of enzyme cleavage revealed increases in activity of cathepsin D and elastase (p <0.05) with subclinical mastitis.