Time can make all the difference in animal disease diagnosis. Early diagnosis can protect herd health, give veterinarians more choices, and save lives.

For many diseases, it’s a waiting game to pinpoint the exact bacteria causing the problem. Traditional means of diagnosis heavily rely on culturing bacteria in old-school petri dishes. That’s still a tried-and-true method, but now scientists at the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, Food and Environment’s Veterinary Diagnostic Lab are hailing a new technology as a game changer for Kentucky animal health.

MALDI-TOF, formally Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization-Time of Flight, has been used in human medicine for many years. Now, veterinary labs across the country are using the technology to aid in bacteria identification.

“Let’s say a dog is sick; it’s having respiratory distress,” said Erdal Erol, DVM, PhD, UKVDL microbiologist. “The veterinarian wants to know how to treat the animal, so he or she sends us a sample. We grow the bacteria for 24 to 48 hours. Then we place the bacteria on a target, use the MALDI-TOF machine and we can give them an almost immediate answer