Milk production plays an important role in the food industry and causes multiple problems for the society and the environment such as greenhouse gas emissions and use of arable land. One way to solve some of these problems is production of milk proteins (MP) with biotechnological methods. We have conducted an experiment to test the feasibility of the concept and compared our findings with other studies in this field of research. We established a primary culture of bovine MEC (mammary epithelial cells) collected from milk and performed a real-time PCR to quantify the differential expression of genes that encode MP in a medium with and without lactogenic hormones. Our results show that the tissue culture we established is capable of expressing MP genes, which is also confirmed by other studies. MP production with biotechnological methods a promising method to solve some of the problems caused by dairy industry, but further studies are needed to optimise the process to the point of market viability.
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