Peptide ELISA and FRET-qPCR Identified a Significantly Higher Prevalence of Chlamydia suis in Domestic Pigs Than in Feral Swine from the State of Alabama, USA

Authors

Md Monirul Hoque, Auburn UniversityFollow
Folasade Adekanmbi, Auburn UniversityFollow
Subarna Barua, Auburn UniversityFollow
Kh. Shamsur Rahman, Auburn UniversityFollow
Virginia Aida, Auburn UniversityFollow
Brian Anderson, Auburn UniversityFollow
Anil Poudel, Auburn UniversityFollow
Anwar Kalalah, Auburn UniversityFollow
Sara Bolds, Auburn UniversityFollow
Steven Madere, Auburn UniversityFollow
Steven Kitchens, Auburn UniversityFollow
Stuart Price, Auburn UniversityFollow
Vienna Brown, USDA APHIS Wildlife ServicesFollow
B. Graeme Lockaby, Auburn UniversityFollow
Constantinos S. Kyriakis, Auburn UniversityFollow
Bernhard Kaltenboeck, Auburn UniversityFollow
Chengming Wang, Auburn UniversityFollow

ORCID IDs

Md Monirul Hoque https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3458-8212

Sara Bolds https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3779-0029

Chengming Wang https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7874-8340

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2021

Citation

Hoque,M.M.; Adekanmbi, F.; Barua, S.; Rahman, K.S.; Aida, V.; Anderson, B.; Poudel, A.; Kalalah, A.; Bolds, S.;Madere, S.; et al. Peptide ELISA and FRET-qPCR Identified a Significantly Higher Prevalence of Chlamydia suis in Domestic Pigs Than in Feral Swine from the State of Alabama, USA. Pathogens 2021, 10, 11. https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ pathogens10010011

Comments

Copyright: © 2020 by the authors. LicenseeMDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the CreativeCommonsAttribution (CCBY) license

Abstract

Chlamydia suis is an important, highly prevalent, and diverse obligate intracellular pathogen infecting pigs. In order to investigate the prevalence and diversity of C. suis in the U.S., 276 whole blood samples from feral swine were collected as well as 109 fecal swabs and 60 whole blood samples from domestic pigs. C. suis-specific peptide ELISA identified anti-C. suis antibodies in 13.0% of the blood of feral swine (26/276) and 80.0% of the domestic pigs (48/60). FRET-qPCR and DNA sequencing found C. suis DNA in 99.1% of the fecal swabs (108/109) and 21.7% of the whole blood (13/60) of the domestic pigs, but not in any of the assayed blood samples (0/267) in feral swine. Phylogenetic comparison of partial C. suis ompA gene sequences and C. suis-specific multilocus sequencing typing (MLST) revealed significant genetic diversity of the C. suis identified in this study. Highly genetically diverse C. suis strains are prevalent in domestic pigs in the USA. As crowding strongly enhances the frequency and intensity of highly prevalent Chlamydia infections in animals, less population density in feral swine than in domestic pigs may explain the significantly lower C. suis prevalence in feral swine. A future study is warranted to obtain C. suis DNA from feral swine to perform genetic diversity of C. suis between commercial and feral pigs.