Tick-borne pathogens in ticks (Acari: Ixodidae) collected from various domestic and wild hosts in Corsica (France), a Mediterranean island environment

Abstract

2 0 2 1 2 2 2 ABSTRACT 2 3Corsica is a touristic mountainous French island in the north-west of the Mediterranean Sea presenting 2 4 a large diversity of natural environments where many interactions between humans, domestic animals 2 5 and wild fauna occur. Despite this favourable context, tick-borne pathogens (TBPs) have not 2 6 systematically been investigated. In this study, a large number of TBPs were screened in ticks 2 7 collected during one year from domestic and wild hosts in Corsica. More than 1,500 ticks belonging 2 8 to nine species and five genera (Rhipicephalus, Hyalomma, Dermacentor, Ixodes and Haemaphysalis) 2 9were analysed individually or pooled (by species, gender, host and locality). A real-time microfluidic 3 0 PCR was used for high-throughput screening of TBPs DNA. This advanced methodology permitted 3 1 the simultaneous detection of 29 bacterial and 12 parasitic species (including Borrelia, Anaplasma,

Equine piroplasmosis in different geographical areas in France: prevalence heterogeneity of asymptomatic carriers and low genetic diversity ofTheileria equiandBabesia caballi

“…Data on T. equi sequences found in France is scarce. We often had to determine genotypes by performing bioinformatic analysis on GenBank sequence references, either deposited directly or referenced as containing identical sequences (Grech-Angelini et al, 2020;Fritz, 2010;Dahmana et al, 2019;Joly Kukla et al, 2024;Bernard et al, 2024). Studies have shown genotype E to be present in all positive horse samples from the northern part of France (Fritz, 2010) and from Marseille on the Mediterranean coast (Dahmana et al, 2019, Theileria sp.…”

Dynamic nesting of Anaplasma marginale in the microbial communities of Rhipicephalus microplus

“…Tick-borne pathogens (TBPs) were detected in individual tick samples through high-throughput realtime microfluidic PCR method (Piloto-Sardiñas, Foucault-Simonin, et al, 2023). This PCR method allows the detection of 27 bacterial species (belonging to the bacterial genera Borrelia, Anaplasma, Ehrlichia, Rickettsia, and Mycoplasma), 7 parasite species (such as Babesia and Hepatozoon), 5 bacterial genera, and 3 parasites taxa (Apicomplexa, Theileria and Hepatozoon) (Grech-Angelini et al, 2020;Michelet et al, 2014). The tested pathogens, target genes, and primer sequences used for amplification are shown in Table S1 (Gondard et al, 2020).…”