β-defensins: An innate defense for bovine mastitis

Vet World Vol.10 August-2017 Article-26

Review Article

Veterinary World, 10(8): 990-998

https://doi.org/10.14202/vetworld.2017.990-998

Ankita Gurao¹, Sudhir Kumar Kashyap¹, and Ravinder Singh²

1. Department of Veterinary Microbiology and Biotechnology, College of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, Rajasthan University for Veterinary and Animal Sciences, Bikaner - 334 001, Rajasthan, India.
2. Department of Biotechnology, Sri Guru Granth Sahib World University, Fatehgarh Sahib - 140 407, Punjab, India.

Background and Aim: Immune challenges are inevitable for livestock that are exposed to a varied range of adverse conditions ranging from environmental to pathogenic stresses. The β-defensins are antimicrobial peptides, belonging to "defensin" family and therefore acts as the first line of defense against the major infections occurring in dairy cattle including intramammary infections. The better resistance to mastitis displayed by Bos indicus is implicit in the fact that they have better adapted and also has more sequence variation with rare allele conserved due to lesser artificial selection pressure than that of Bos taurus. Among the 58 in silico predicted β-defensins, only a few have been studied in the aspect of intramammary infections. The data on polymorphisms occurring in various β-defensin genes is limited in B. indicus, indicating toward higher possibilities for exploring marker for mastitis resistance. The following review shall focus on concisely summarizing the up-to-date research on β-defensins in B. taurus and discuss the possible scope for research in B. indicus.

Keywords: Bos indicus, β-defensins, mastitis.

How to cite this article: Gurao A, Kashyap SK, Singh R (2017) β-defensins: An innate defense for bovine mastitis, Veterinary World, 10(8): 990-998.

Received: 26-05-2017 Accepted: 29-07-2017 Published online: 26-08-2017

Corresponding author: Ankita Gurao E-mail: agurao32@gmail.com

DOI: 10.14202/vetworld.2017.990-998

Copyright: Gurao, et al. This article 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 you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http:// creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.