Mycoplasma agalactiae (Ma) is one of the main aetiological agents of intramammary infections in small ruminants, causing contagious agalactia. To better understand the underlying disease patterns a primary goat mammary epithelial cell (pgMEC) culture was established from the mammary tissue and challenged with Ma. High-throughput mRNA sequencing was performed to reveal differentially expressed genes (DEG) at different time-points (3 h, 12 h, and 24 h) post infection (PI).The pathway enrichment analysis of the DEG showed that infection significantly affected pathways associated with immune response, steroid metabolism, fatty acid metabolism, apoptosis signalling,transcription regulation, and cell cycle regulation. Based on the results we suggest that mammary epithelial cells in vivo contribute to the immune system by the induced expression of cytokinez and other chemotactic agents, activation of the complement system and apoptosis pathways, and expression of genes coding for antimicrobial molecules and peptides. In our study we attempted to interpret the detected transcriptomic changes in a biological context and infer mammary infection resistance candidate genes, interesting for further validation. Additionally, the results represent comprehensive goat mammary transcriptome information and demonstrate the applicability of the comparative genomics approach for annotation of goat data, using transcriptome information of a closely related species (Bos taurus) as a reference.
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