Somatotropic gene response to recombinant growth hormone treatment in buffalo leucocytes

The use of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rbGH) to increase milk yield in cows is banned in some countries. In others, where it is authorised, it has triggered harsh debates on labelling of dairy products. If many studies have been performed on bovines, there is a lack of information on buffaloes, which are sometimes treated with rbGH and re-present an important economical resource for dairy products in some countries. Analytical methods with legal value for surveillance of rbGH treatments do not yet exist. Research on gene expression biomarkers is one of the most promising approaches to this purpose. For this reason, we treated five buffaloes for 10 weeks with a sustained-release formulation of rbGH and analysed the response of 20 somatotropic axis genes in leucocytes by real-time polymerase chain reaction. Overall changes in gene expression levels were of low magnitude and sometimes affected by the 'time' factor. Only the IGFBP-1 gene showed a significant under-expression (about two-fold; p <0.001) in treated animals. Taken together, these results give evidence that expression analysis of the somatotropic axis genes in leucocytes is little helpful for discrimination of rbGH-treated buffaloes, but do not exclude that another array of genes could provide useful patterns of variation.