Population Structure of Bartonella henselae in Algerian Urban Stray Cats

Abstract

Whole blood samples from 211 stray cats from Algiers, Algeria, were cultured to detect the presence of Bartonella species and to evaluate the genetic diversity of B. henselae strains by multiple locus VNTR analysis (MLVA). Bartonella henselae was the only species isolated from 36 (17%) of 211 cats. B. henselae genotype I was the predominant genotype (64%). MLVA typing of 259 strains from 30 bacteremic cats revealed 52 different profiles as compared to only 3 profiles using MLST. Of these 52 profiles, 48 (92.3%) were identified for the first time. One-third of the cats harbored one MLVA profile only. As there was a correlation between the age of cats and the number of MLVA profiles, we hypothesized that the single profile in these cats was the profile of the initial infecting strain. Two-third of the cats harbored 2 to 6 MLVA profiles simultaneously. The similarity of MLVA profiles obtained from the same cat, neighbor-joining clustering and structure-neighbor clustering indicate that such a diversity likely results from two different mechanisms occurring either independently or simultaneously: independent infections and genetic drift from a primary strain.

Distribution of Bartonella henselae Variants in Patients, Reservoir Hosts and Vectors in Spain

“…It is noteworthy that two STs and 35 profiles have never been described. In a recent study in Algeria, co-infections of different variants in cats were frequently found [26], whereas all the isolates that we obtained from the same cat in our study were identical. The small number of isolates per cat analyzed and the probable special difficulty in culturing some variants could explain this discrepancy.…”

“…The identified profiles were submitted to a public database (http://mlva.u-psud.fr/) which has been created for this study with all the published profiles up to date. These profile numbers have been assigned chronologically according to the date of the publications where these profiles were described [12], [26], [27]. The MLVA profile 1 was assigned to the Houston strain.…”

“…Clustering analysis was performed including all the 174 profiles described previously [26], [27], [35] together with the 41 from this study, using the Unweighted Pair Group Method Using Arithmetic Averages (UPGMA) to infer the phylogenetic relationships of the profiles. The minimum spanning tree with all these profiles was built with the same software.…”

“…Those STs which infect humans fall in lineages 1, 2 and 3, while lineage 4 is composed exclusively of feline isolates [24], [25]. Finally, multi-locus variable number tandem repeats (VNTR) analysis (MLVA) is the method with the highest discriminatory power, with 174 different profiles described until now after the analysis of 481 isolates [12], [26], [27]. MLVA organized the profiles in two main clades, placing all the human isolates in one of them [12].…”

Halk Sağlığı Açısından Pet ve Başıboş Kedilerde Bartonella henselae Prevelansı: Tek Tıp - Tek Sağlık Konseptinde Örnek Bir Çalışma

“…[20] . In Algeria, Bartonella henselae seroprevalence was found to be 17% in stray cats [27] . In a study carried out in Turkey, Bartonella henselae seroprevalence in cats in the Ankara region was found to be 18.8% [28] .…”