Molecular diagnostics applied to mastitis problems on dairy farms.

Mastitis in dairy cows is among the most important diseases of dairy cattle worldwide. Mastitis is most often the response of the host to an intramammary infection. Accurate and cost-effective methods of identifying mastitis pathogens are important for the diagnosis, surveillance, and control of this economically important disease. Rapid identification methods have the potential to be extremely specific and can also discriminate among closely related organisms. A wide range of phenotyping and genotyping methods have been developed or implemented to study mastitis-causing bacteria of dairy cattle at the species and subspecies level. This article provides the basis for evaluating molecular diagnostic technologies as a routine tool in diagnosing mastitis pathogens.