Sonstegard, TadSeto, DonaldAswath, Kshama2015-07-292015-07-292015https://hdl.handle.net/1920/9622Mastitis, an endemic disease, affects the mammary glands of lactating cows and contributes to an estimated annual loss of two billion dollars to the U.S. dairy economy (Hogeveen, Huijps, & Lam, 2011). Many bacterial pathogens, for example, Streptococcus uberis, Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli, if left undetected and untreated at sub-clinical stages of infection, can cause an endemic disease like mastitis (Barkema, Green, Bradley, & Zadoks, 2009). Mastitis negatively affects the quality and quantity of milk produced from a lactating animal (De Vliegher, Fox, Piepers, McDougall, & Barkema, 2012) and extensive use of antibiotics to treat this disease can have possible downstream implications on consumer safety, which, in turn pose a threat to human health. Recent research has shown the potential of circulating miRNAs as non-invasive biomarkers in disease diagnosis and therapeutics (Zen & Zhang, 2012). miRNAs present in the milk are shown to be packaged into exosomes, a type of extracellular micro vesicle secreted by various cells (Valadi et al., 2007).117 pagesenCopyright 2015 Kshama AswathBioinformaticsBovineExosomesMastitisMiRNANext Generation SequencingDissertation