“…A number of bovine mammary cell lines have been established, among these the MAC-T (Huynh et al, 1991) and the BME-UV1 (Zavizion et al, 1996) cell lines, both of which were immortalised by transfection with the SV40 T-antigen. MAC-T cells have been used for studies of many bioactives, including fatty acids, growth factors, steroids, retinoids, cytokines and mammary extracts, and parameters such as viability, proliferation, apoptosis, gene expression, epithelial transport, cell signalling and lipogenesis (Woodward et al, 1996;Cohick and Turner, 1998;Berry et al, 2003;Peterson et al, 2004;Zarzynska et al, 2005;Thorn et al, 2006 andBruzelius et al, 2008;Keating et al, 2008;Sorensen et al, 2008;Zhou et al, 2008). MAC-T cells also represent a more general model of the mammary gland, as these cells retain a number of biochemical and morphological characteristics typical of mammary epithelial cells in vivo.…”