Novel approaches to prevent bovine mastitis by microbiome manipulation - Nouvelles approches en matière de prévention de la mammite bovine par la manipulation du microbiome

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Bovine mastitis is a complex disease that is one of the costliest issues in dairy production - resulting in a net-loss of at least $665-million annually from the Canadian Dairy Industry. This is a particularly important problem in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, which combined house about 70% of the dairy cattle in Canada. Bovine mastitis can be classified as either contagious mastitis, which results from the spread of pathogenic bacteria from cow to cow; or environmental mastitis, in which the pathogens were acquired from the environment in which the cow lives. Contagious mastitis is still the most serious type of this disease; however, in the past few decades there has been a major decrease in the prevalence of contagious mastitis and an absolute increase in the incidence of environmental mastitis, making the latter an important problem for the dairy industry to address. Escherichia coli is the most common cause of environmental mastitis. We have used a bacterial comparative genomics approach to identify a set of 9 genes which are able to differentiate harmless commensal bovine E. coli from environmental strains that are capable of causing mastitis. We chose two of these nine genes to develop a CRISPR-Cas9 system that can remove problematic E. coli strains from the bovine gastrointestinal system. This is an innovative strategy to lessen the burden of environmental mastitis in the Canadian dairy industry. The next step in taking this novel product to market is pre-clinical testing to determine safety in cows. In this project McGill, University of Sherbrooke, and the University of Guelph will partner to clinically test this technology. The dairy research facility at the University of Guelph will be the primary site of testing. This project will train one post-doctoral fellow in bovine mastitis, next-generation sequencing, bioinformatics, comparative genomics, and conducting clinical trials in dairy cattle.