Volume: 56 Issue: 1
Year: 2025, Page: 93-102, Doi: https://doi.org/10.51966/jvas.2025.56.1.93-102
Received: Sept. 29, 2024 Accepted: Dec. 5, 2024 Published: March 31, 2025
Mastitis, with its complex pathogenicity and multi-aetiological factors, is a major threat to the cattle population, causing major production losses. The present study was conducted in representative tissue samples from the udder, teat and tissue swabs taken from mammary glands of thirty-two cattle with red swollen udders brought to slaughterhouses and from animals brought for post-mortem examination. The tissues having prominent gross pathological changes, such as congestion, inflamed appearance and tissue thickening were selected for the study. The tissue swabs were subjected to microbial culture examination by streaking on Brain heart infusion agar (BHIA) initially and then on Mannitol salt agar (MSA). Of these, the colonies isolated from 41 tissue samples were mannitol fermenters and identified as Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus). These colonies were preserved and subjected to genotypic confirmation by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) using 16SrRNA for genus identification and 23SrRNA for species identification. Histopathological examination of S. aureus infected tissues revealed various lesions. These included mononuclear inflammatory cell infiltration indicating a chronic infection, alveolar epithelial hyperplasia, cytoplasmic vacuolation, eosinophilic secretions within the lumens, degeneration of the alveolar epithelial membrane, presence of corpora amylacea in the alveoli and moderate to severe thickening of connective tissue. Histopathology grading showed that S. aureus infected tissues exhibited Grade 3 and Grade 2 inflammation, characterised by a significant infiltration of mononuclear cells, particularly lymphocytes. The 41 isolates were further subjected to PCR for screening for the presence of biofilm formation genes icaA, icaD, bap and eno. The percentage of isolates with the studied biofilm-forming genes were as follows- icaA (63.41 per cent), icaD (58.53 per cent), eno (70.73 per cent) and bap (12.2 per cent). The presence of eno gene was seen in most of the isolates while that of bap gene was the least. The alcian blue staining technique demonstrated the presence of biofilms in the infected tissue, revealing them as light blue filaments within the interstitial spaces of the mammary gland.
Keywords: Mastitis, Staphylococcus aureus, biofilm, icaA, icaD, bap, eno
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© 2025 Sreepriya et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Sreepriya T. R., K. Kuppusamy, Nair S. R., K. S. Prasanna, I. S. Sajitha and R. Anoopraj. 2024. Pathological changes in mammary gland and its association with biofilm forming Staphylococcus aureus in mastitis milk of cattle.
J. Vet. Anim. Sci. 56 (1):93-102