Histoplasma capsulatum Isolated from Tadarida brasiliensis Bats Captured in Mexico Form a Sister Group to North American Class 2 Clade.

Tania Vite-Garín,David S Gernandt,Rosely M Zancopé-Oliveira,Jorge H Sahaza,Maria Lucia Taylor,Gabriela Rodríguez-Arellanes,John W Taylor,María Del Rocío Reyes-Montes,Daniel A Estrada-Bárcenas,Cristina E Canteros,José A Ramírez,Lisandra Serra-Damasceno

doi:10.3390/jof7070529

Abstract

Histoplasma capsulatum is a dimorphic fungus associated with respiratory and systemic infections in mammalian hosts that have inhaled infective mycelial propagules. A phylogenetic reconstruction of this pathogen, using partial sequences of arf, H-anti, ole1, and tub1 protein-coding genes, proposed that H. capsulatum has at least 11 phylogenetic species, highlighting a clade (BAC1) comprising three H. capsulatum isolates from infected bats captured in Mexico. Here, relationships for each individual locus and the concatenated coding regions of these genes were inferred using parsimony, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian inference methods. Coalescent-based analyses, a concatenated sequence-types (CSTs) network, and nucleotide diversities were also evaluated. The results suggest that six H. capsulatum isolates from the migratory bat Tadarida brasiliensis together with one isolate from a Mormoops megalophylla bat support a NAm 3 clade, replacing the formerly reported BAC1 clade. In addition, three H. capsulatum isolates from T. brasiliensis were classified as lineages. The concatenated sequence analyses and the CSTs network validate these findings, suggesting that NAm 3 is related to the North American class 2 clade and that both clades could share a recent common ancestor. Our results provide original information on the geographic distribution, genetic diversity, and host specificity of H. capsulatum.

Highlights

Given its relationship to NAm 2, we propose naming this new clade formed here with seven H. capsulatum isolates as NAm 3, highlighting that this clade incorporated three H. capsulatum isolates that had been previously described by Taylor et al [21] and later considered as a new phylogenetic species denominated BAC1 by Teixeira et al [26]
We analyzed sequences of nine H. capsulatum isolates from T. brasiliensis: six (EH-384I, EH-384P, EH-655P, EH-658H, EH-670B, and EH-670H) belong to the NAm 3 phylogenetic species, while the other three (EH-672B, EH-672H, and EH-696P) are proposed as lone lineages
Concatenated sequence analyses and the Concatenated Sequence-Types (CSTs) network support these findings in the H. capsulatum complex

Summary

Introduction

Histoplasma capsulatum is a pathogenic ascomycete that infects humans and other mammals. This fungus is distributed worldwide and is usually found in bird and bat creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Infected bats could act as reservoirs and dispersers of H. capsulatum in favorable environments, playing a possible role in the incorporation of the fungus in new ecological niches [7,8,9]. Over the last three decades, H. capsulatum has been the subject of several genotyping studies that have engaged its DNA polymorphism using molecular tools such as restriction fragment length polymorphism and random amplified polymorphic DNA methods [10,11,12,13,14,15,16], analyses of individual and concatenated genes [17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26] and whole genomes [27,28], which have contributed to the knowledge of the genetic diversity and phylogeny of this pathogen

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