Commercial cattle breeders produce their own herd offspring for the dairy and beef market
using artificial insemination. The procedure involves sanitary risks associated with the
collection and commercialization of the germplasm, and the in vitro production and transfer
of the bovine embryos must be monitored by strict health surveillance. To avoid the
spreading of infectious diseases, one must rely on using controlled and monitored germplasm,
media, and reagents that are guaranteed free of pathogens. In this article, we
investigated the use of a new mass spectrometric approach for fast and accurate identification
of bacteria and fungi in bovine semen and in culture media employed in the embryo
in vitro production process. The microorganisms isolated from samples obtained in
a commercial bovine embryo IVP setting were identified in a few minutes by their conserved
peptide/protein profile, obtained applying matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization mass
spectrometry (MALDI-MS), matched against a commercial database. The successful microorganisms
MS identification has been confirmed by DNA amplification and sequencing.
Therefore, the MS technique seems to offer a powerful tool for rapid and accurate microorganism
identification in semen and culture media samples.