Developing liquid AP-MALDI MS as a rapid large-scale classification method for determining farm animal health

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Good farm animal health is paramount for food safety and security. It also reduces the burden on the environment and public health by a reduction in disease treatments using antimicrobials or other drugs. Greater knowledge and earlier detection of agriculturally important diseases will result in better farm disease management and welfare of farm animals as well as improved food produce yield and safety. In addition, recent food adulteration scandals have highlighted the need for faster and more detailed knowledge of our food and its production line to determine and guarantee food authenticity.Information gathering for all of the above is still limited by the analytical methods available. Some of these are not sufficiently cost-effective and/or too cumbersome and slow for rapid action. Others can be fast but are often very targeted, allowing the detection of only one condition, and limited in their practical use, particularly in combination with other tests.Fortunately, advances in modern mass spectrometry now allow highly sensitive recordings of the molecular profiles of biological samples such as milk. In combination with advanced bioinformatics these recordings can be used to teach computer algorithms for future classification and thus detection of agriculturally important conditions such as mastitis. As modern mass spectrometry is one of the most sensitive molecular detection and characterisation techniques, allowing the analysis of many molecular biomarkers simultaneously, there is now a great opportunity to make a step change in the early detection of such markers for many diseases in a cost-effective and fast way.However, cost-effectiveness and speed of analysis can still be limited due to the sample preparation necessary for analysis by mass spectrometry. Our lab has recently demonstrated that biological samples such as milk can be effectively analysed by mass spectrometry with no or minimal sample preparation by using liquid MALDI mass spectrometry.In collaboration with the University of Reading's Department of Agriculture and Centre of Dairy Research (CEDAR) with its large research herd of around 600 cows, we now aim to explore and fully develop a rapid analysis workflow for biological fluids from farm animals based on modern liquid MALDI mass spectrometry. This workflow should allow for early and specific detection of agriculturally important diseases and conditions, exploiting to the fullest mass spectrometry's great potential in highly sensitive, fast and inexpensive characterisation of the health of our farm animals and their produce.