Milk fat globules (MFGs) are vesicles released in milk as fat droplets surrounded by the endoplasmic reticulum and apical cell membranes. During formation and apocrine secretion by lactocytes, various amounts of cytoplasmic crescents remain trapped within the released vesicle, making MFGs a natural sampling mechanism of the lactating cell contents. With the aim of investigating the events occurring in the mammary epithelium during bacterial infection, the MFG proteome was characterized by two-dimensional difference gel electrophoresis (2-D DIGE), SDS-PAGE followed by shotgun liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (GeLC-MS/MS), label-free quantification by the normalized spectral abundance factor (NSAF) approach, Western blotting, and pathway analysis, using sheep naturally infected by Mycoplasma agalactiae. A number of protein classes were found to increase in MFGs upon infection, including proteins involved in inflammation and host defense, cortical cytoskeleton proteins, heat shock proteins, and proteins related to oxidative stress. Conversely, a strikingly lower abundance was observed for proteins devoted to MFG metabolism and secretion. To our knowledge, this is the first report describing proteomic changes occurring in MFGs during sheep infectious mastitis. The results presented here offer new insights into the in vivo response of mammary epithelial cells to bacterial infection and open the way to the discovery of protein biomarkers for monitoring clinical and subclinical mastitis.
Neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) are structures composed of DNA, histones, and antimicrobial proteins that are released extracellularly by neutrophils and other immune cells as a means for trapping and killing invading pathogens. Here, we describe NET formation in milk and in mammary alveoli of mastitic sheep, and provide a dataset of proteins found in association to these structures. Nucleic acid staining, immunomicroscopy and fluorescent in-situ hybridization of mastitic mammary tissue from sheep infected with Streptococcus uberis demonstrated the presence of extranuclear DNA colocalizing with antimicrobial proteins, histones, and bacteria. Then, proteomic analysis by LTQ-Orbitrap Velos mass spectrometry provided detailed information on protein abundance changes occurring in milk upon infection. As a result, 1095 unique proteins were identified, of which 287 being significantly more abundant in mastitic milk. Upon protein ontology classification, the most represented localization classes for upregulated proteins were the cytoplasmic granule, the nucleus, and the mitochondrion, while function classes were mostly related to immune defence and inflammation pathways. All known NET markers were massively increased, including histones, granule proteases, and antimicrobial proteins. Of note was the detection of protein arginine deiminases (PAD3 and PAD4). These enzymes are responsible for citrullination, the post-translational modification that is known to trigger NET formation by inducing chromatin decondensation and extracellular release of NETs. As a further observation, citrullinated residues were detected by tandem mass spectrometry in histones of samples from mastitic animals. In conclusion, this work provides novel microscopic and proteomic information on NETs formed in vivo in the mammary gland, and reports the most complete database of proteins increased in milk upon bacterial mastitis.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13567-015-0196-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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