Developing of a method to count the number of cells in the milk of individual cows by analyzing tank milk

Mastitis is the most important health issue in dairy cattle costing European farmers more than 1 billion € per year.  Prevention of mastitis includes periodically counting the number somatic cells in the milk of individual cows as these numbers increase prior to the development of clinical symptoms.   As profit margins diminish, farmers tend to forgo this costly preventive measure. We have developed a method that allows to estimate somatic cell counts for individual cows yet by analyzing the milk in the farm’s tank, i.e. by performing one analysis for the entire farm.   It is based on SNP genotyping of the tank’s milk and deconvoluting the allelic frequencies in the contributions of the individual (SNP-genotyped) cows.  The patented technology is commercialized world-wide by Seenergie under the trademark “Génocellules” (https://www.seenergi.fr/seenergi-technologie/genocellules).

Key publications

SNP-based quantitative deconvolution of biological mixtures: application to the detection of cows with subclinical mastitis by whole-genome sequencing of tank milk. Coppieters W, Karim L, Georges M. Genome Res 30:1201-1207 (2020).

Identifying cows with subclinical mastitis by bulk single nucleotide polymorphism genotyping of tank milk. Blard G, Zhang Z, Coppieteres W, Georges M.  J Dairy Sci 95: 4109-4113 (2012).