Abstract
For the last 13 years, the fur industry in Europe has suffered from epidemic spouts of a severe necrotizing pyoderma. It affects all species currently farmed for fur and causes animal welfare problems and significant losses to the farmers. The causative agent of this disease was identified as Arcanobacterium phocae. Previously, this bacterium has been isolated from seals and other marine mammals, apparently causing wound and lung infections. Attempts at antibiotic treatment have been unsuccessful and the current advice on preventing the disease is to cull all animals with clinical signs. This poses an urgent question regarding possible vaccine development, as well as the need for further understanding of the pathogenicity of this organism. This study compared the whole genomes of 42 A. phocae strains isolated from seals, blue foxes, finnraccoons, mink and otter. The sequences were created using the Illumina technology and annotations were done using the RAST pipeline. A phylogenetic analysis identified a clear separation between the seal strains and the fur-animal-derived isolates, but also indicated that the bacterium readily adapts to new environments and host species with reasonable diversity. A pan- and core-genome was created and analyzed for proteins. A further analysis identified several virulence factors as well as multiple putative and secreted proteins of special interest for vaccine development.
Highlights
We have constructed the genomes of 41 A. phocae isolates via highthroughput sequencing and we have obtained the genome of the original isolate from Genbank for comparison
List of the annotated genes predicted for the 41 newly sequenced genomes is given as supporting information (Supplementary Table S1), with each genomic sequence deposited into GenBank (Supplementary Table S2)
We have studied A. phocae strains from two separate ecological niches
Summary
In 2007, a new and emerging disease affecting fur animals was detected in Finland, and elsewhere in Europe. This disease is a contagious, necrotizing pyoderma, which causes severe animal welfare problems. It affects all fur animal species grown in Finland, but the signs of disease seem to differ according to species. The disease has been described, and the causative agent preliminarily identified as Arcanobacterium phocae. The etiology of this multifactorial disease-causing necrotizing pyoderma was partially uncovered later through an infection experiment [1,2]. The disease is highly contagious and shows poor response to antibiotic treatment, and the best practice has been to cull the affected animals to stop the epidemic
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