Vet World   Vol.11   May-2018  Article-1

Milk somatic cells, factors influencing their release, future prospects, and practical utility in dairy animals: An overview

Background and Aim: Milk somatic cells (SCs) are a mixture of milk-producing cells and immune cells. These cells are secreted in milk during the normal course of milking and are used as an index for estimating mammary health and milk quality of dairy animals worldwide. Milk SC is influenced by cow productivity, health, parity, lactation stage, and breed of an animal. Any change in environmental conditions, poor management practices, and also stressful conditions significantly increases the amount of SC coming in milk. Better hygiene and proper nutrition help in reducing milk SC. Milk with low SC means better milk products with a longer shelf life. The present review describes the role of SCs (both secretory and immune) in milk, their role in maintaining the integrity of the mammary gland, and factors affecting their release in milk. This information may help to reduce milk somatic cell counts (SCCs) and to establish differential SCC standards.

Keywords: dairy animals, factors influencing, milk, somatic cells release, utility.

How to cite this article: Alhussien MN, Dang AK (2018) Milk somatic cells, factors influencing their release, future prospects, and practical utility in dairy animals: An overview, Veterinary World, 11(5): 562-577.

Received: 20-01-2018  Accepted: 06-04-2018     Published online: 02-05-2018

Corresponding author: Ajay Kumar Dang   E-mail: rajadang@rediffmail.com

DOI: 10.14202/vetworld.2018.562-577

Copyright: Alhussien and Dang, 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.