Omics applications in the fight against abuse of anabolic substances in cattle: challenges, perspectives and opportunities

Abstract

• Omics techniques can identify biomarkers for untargeted screening of growth promoter . • Advanced statistics can help to overcome some limitations of current omics workflows. • Implementation in current legislation of relevant omics-technologies is recommended. • Multi-omics data fusion approaches will play a major role in animal science. Omics techniques, already applied into several topics of animal science, are considered useful tools in the fight against abuse of prohibited drugs in food producing animals: indeed, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics seem to be the most relevant untargeted applications to overcome limitations of the conventional analytical targeted approach. Such limitations, often related to use of novel designer drugs and/or rapid elimination of drugs residues from blood, urine, milk and other animal tissues, usually does not affect induced biological alterations in treated animals. Omics sciences represent therefore an alternative diagnostic approach for untargeted screening of growth promoters’ abuse. The most relevant biomarkers-based approaches are reported in the present review on domestic cattle.