Mastitis, a kind of infection of mammary tissue, costs the US dairy industry billions annually, and extracts an uncalculable cost in animal suffering. On page 66, Kerr et al. demonstrate a possible biotechnology solution: transgenic mice that secrete in their own milk a potent antibacterial protein, lysostaphin, that targets one of the main culprits, Staphylococcus sp. They introduced a pair of mutations in the bacterial lysostaphin gene that conferred staphylolytic activity, and fused it to part of the ovine β-lactoglobulin gene to mediate secretion into milk. Transgenic mice expressing the construct proved highly resistant to S. aureus infection, and were apparently otherwise unaffected.
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Jamison, J. Got milk?. Nat Biotechnol 19, 8 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/83614
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/83614