Milk Productions And Maternal Antibody Productions

Hi, students in Taipei Medical University! My name is Tomonori NOCHI. I’m a faculty member of Tohoku University  Graduate School of Agricultural Science in Japan. I’m very happy to take this  opportunity to talk to you guys about our recent research  progress in terms of food science. Especially I would like to talk  to you about the milk productions and maternal antibody productions  that should be exactly transferred from mother to the neonates. So the title of my talk today is the molecular mechanism by which maternal  antibodies are produced in the mammary gland. So let’s start.

To understand how we collect  milk from dairy cattle I’d firstly like to ask you  to become a dairy farmer. So now you have dairy cattle. What you have to do first to your dairy  cattle is the artificial insemination because if you have just the diary cattle,  but you don’t do the artificial insemination, of course you cannot get milk, that’s why your dairy cattle should be pregnant. And pregnant period of dairy cattle is  280 days, that is almost same to human meaning that 280 days after  the artificial insemination the dairy cattle can get babies, meaning  that you can start collecting milk. This graph shows you how much amount of  milk can be collected from one dairy cattle.

We usually collect milk for  10 months after parturition. And this graph shows you how much  amount of milk can be collected. So Y axis is kilogram per day, like little per day. So in usual, 30 or 40 kilograms of milk can  be collected in a day from one dairy cattle. And the amount of milk  production is increased gradually and then going down for 10 months. And we stop collecting milk for two months after 10 months of lactation period  then we restart to collect milk.

That means you have to do again  the artificial insemination during fast lactation period otherwise  you cannot restart collecting milk. And dairy farmers usually repeat  this lactation cycle several times. So let me calculate how much money  you can get from one lactation period. If you can get 8,000 kilograms of milk  for 10 months in a one lactation cycle dairy farmers can get (90  yen) 0.8 US dollars in usual. That means 6,400 dollars can be  obtained from one dairy cattle.

For 10 months. But of course, they need to pay for diet. Well, if they have people, dairy farmers  have people who help collecting milk,   of course they have to pay for them. So in usual, the amount of money  that they can use, they can get   is 1,600 US dollars. I think it’s not so high. Another issue that you have to think about is if  you want to have one pregnant new dairy cattle that is very expensive, that  is almost 8,000 dollars. So potentially the dairy farmers want to  repeat the lactation period several times, like five, six, seven, and  potentially it’s possible However, the problem here   in the worldwide is the average of lactation  cycle is not like five, six, seven.

It is just two or three  every country in the world. Because the caused of infectious  diseases in the adults, named “Mastitis” caused by staphylococcus or E. coli or  other pathogenic bacterial infections. An economic loss in my country is very high. But in Taipei, what in Taiwan, is also very high. That’s why understanding of the  immune system in the mammalian gland, where in adult is very much  important to control the mastitis.