Rothia nasimurium as a Cause of Disease: First Isolation from Farmed Chickens

Abstract

Rothia nasimurium is a facultative anaerobic Gram-positive coccus belonging to the Rothia genus of the Micrococcaceae family. While Rothia nasimurium is considered an opportunistic pathogen, to date few studies have investigated its pathogenicity and drug resistance. In January 2022, chickens at a poultry farm in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region became ill and died. Treatment with commonly used Chinese medicines and antibiotics was ineffective, causing economic losses to the poultry farm. In order to determine the cause of the disease in these poultry farm chickens, the isolation and identification of the pathogens in the livers and other internal organs of the sick and dead chickens were performed. Further, animal pathogenicity tests, antibiotic susceptibility tests, and the detection of antibiotic resistance genes were carried out to analyze the pathogenicity and drug resistance of the identified pathogens. A Gram-positive coccus was isolated from the livers of the diseased chickens. The isolate was resistant to 17 antibiotics, including ciprofloxacin, chloramphenicol, and florfenicol, and was only sensitive to penicillin, amikacin, and tigecycline, to varying degrees. The results of the drug resistance gene testing indicated that the isolated bacterium carried 13 kinds of resistance genes. Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry, morphological observations, biochemical tests, and 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis were performed on the isolated bacterium, and it was determined that the isolated bacterial strain was Rothia nasimurium. The animal pathogenicity tests showed that the isolate caused feather loss and death in chicks; the clinical symptoms and necropsy lesions of the test chicks were consistent with those observed in the farmed chickens. A review of the literature revealed that, to date, there are no reports of infection with Rothia nasimurium in chickens. Thus, in this study, Rothia nasimurium was isolated from chickens for the first time and an investigation of the biological characteristics of the bacterium was carried out in order to provide a reference for the clinical treatment, prevention, and control of Rothia nasimurium infection.

Genome sequencing of drake semen micobiome with correlation with their compositions, sources and potential mechanisms affecting semen quality

“…Notably, among the 24 genera of microbes presented in drake semen, 8 genera that mainly originated from the environment and cloaca were pathogenic microbes. Achromobacter is a key pathogen causing lung injury ( Veschetti et al, 2022 ; Zhou et al, 2023b ); Aerococcus not only associated with urinary tract and bloodstream infections in human ( Tai et al, 2021 ), but also has been reported to be associated with infectious diarrhea in poultry ( Khafagy et al, 2023 ); and Corynebacterium ( Enurah et al, 2016 ), Enterococcus ( Dolka et al, 2017 ), Kocuria ( Yang et al, 2021 ; Ziogou et al, 2023 ), Pseudomonas ( Pattison et al, 2008 ), Rothia ( Zhang et al, 2022 ), and Staphylococcus infections could affect lots of diseases such as haemorrhagic inflammation of the upper respiratory tract, vertebral abscess, necrotic enteritis, and hepatomegaly ( Szafraniec et al, 2022 ), etc. These results suggest that the negative effects of AI in the duck industry may be due to import the harmful microbes into the reproductive tract of female ducks.…”

Detection and High-Throughput Microbial Analysis of Particulate Matter in Houses and Downwind Areas of Duck Farms

“…For example, the opportunistic pathogen Rothia nasimurium was first in the PM2.5 samples at 13.6%, and it can infect animals such as dogs, pigs, ducks, rabbits, and geese. The bacterium was isolated from captive chickens and geese for the first time and was found to be multidrug resistant by drug sensitivity test and animal regression test, resulting in severe hair loss in chickens and geese [68,69]. Staphylococcus aureus (0.46%) is a kind of pathogen that can cause primary infections in humans or animals, leading to severe clinical conditions such as bacteremia and sepsis [70].…”

Prevalence and antimicrobial resistance profile of bacterial pathogens isolated from poultry in Jiangxi Province, China from 2020 to 2022

“…Rothia nasimurium is a facultative anaerobic gram-positive coccus and part of the commensal flora of humans and other animals. Until recently, R. nasimurium was reported to be an opportunistic pathogen to ducks ( Wang et al, 2021 ) and chickens ( Zhang et al, 2022 ). Here, R. nasimurium strains were recovered from not only ducks and chickens but also geese.…”