Abstract
Aliarcobacter butzleri is an emerging foodborne and zoonotic pathogen that is usually transmitted via contaminated food or water. A. butzleri is not only the most prevalent Aliarcobacter species, it is also closely related to thermophilic Campylobacter, which have shown increasing resistance in recent years. Therefore, it is important to assess its resistance and virulence profiles. In this study, 45 Aliarcobacter butzleri strains from water poultry farms in Thuringia, Germany, were subjected to an antimicrobial susceptibility test using the gradient strip diffusion method and whole-genome sequencing. In the phylogenetic analysis, the genomes of the German strains showed high genetic diversity. Thirty-three isolates formed 11 subgroups containing two to six strains. The antimicrobial susceptibility testing showed that 32 strains were resistant to erythromycin, 26 to doxycycline, and 20 to tetracycline, respectively. Only two strains were resistant to ciprofloxacin, while 39 strains were resistant to streptomycin. The in silico prediction of the antimicrobial resistance profiles identified a large repertoire of potential resistance mechanisms. A strong correlation between a gyrA point mutation (Thr-85-Ile) and ciprofloxacin resistance was found in 11 strains. A partial correlation was observed between the presence of the bla3 gene and ampicillin resistance. In silico virulence profiling revealed a broad spectrum of putative virulence factors, including a complete lipid A cluster in all studied genomes.
Highlights
The species Aliarcobacter (A.) butzleri belongs to the genus Aliarcobacter, a member of the Campylobacteraceae family, together with A. cryaerophilus, A. skirrowii, A. thereius, A. cibarius, A. lanthieri, A. faecis, and A. trophiarum (Pérez-Cataluña et al, 2018a,b, 2019).A. butzleri is an emerging foodborne and zoonotic pathogen that has been considered as a serious hazard to human health (ICMSF, 2002; Collado and Figueras, 2011; Ramees et al, 2017)
The analysis showed that the German A. butzleri strains were highly similar (>95%) to the other European A. butzleri strains used in this study, confirming that those genomes belong to the same species (Goris et al, 2007; Richter and Rossello-Mora, 2009) (Figure 1, Supplementary Table 2)
The remaining nine efflux pumps (EP) belong to the ATP-binding cassette (ABC) (EP3), RND (EP4, EP7, EP11, EP15, EP16), and major facilitator superfamily (MFS) families (EP9, EP17) and were present in 16 A. butzleri genomes. These findings showed that A. butzleri harbors all major families of efflux transporters which are present in prokaryotes except for the multidrug and toxic efflux (MATE) family (Webber and Piddock, 2003)
Summary
The species Aliarcobacter (A.) butzleri (former Arcobacter butzleri) belongs to the genus Aliarcobacter, a member of the Campylobacteraceae family, together with A. cryaerophilus, A. skirrowii, A. thereius, A. cibarius, A. lanthieri, A. faecis, and A. trophiarum (Pérez-Cataluña et al, 2018a,b, 2019).A. butzleri is an emerging foodborne and zoonotic pathogen that has been considered as a serious hazard to human health (ICMSF, 2002; Collado and Figueras, 2011; Ramees et al, 2017). Since A. butzleri is frequently isolated from food-producing animals, these animals should be considered as an important reservoir (Rahimi, 2014; Giacometti et al, 2015; Rathlavath et al, 2017; Sekhar et al, 2017; Caruso et al, 2018; Chieffi et al, 2020). This would require successful colonization of the intestines and contamination during the slaughter process (Chieffi et al, 2020)
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