Haemoplasma prevalence and diversity in three invasive Rattus species from Gauteng Province, South Africa

• Published in: Microorganisms
• Main Authors: Retief, Liezl, Chimimba, Christian Timothy, Oosthuizen, Marinda, Matshotshi, Asiashu, Bastos, Armanda
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI 2022
• Subjects: Mycoplasma; Haemoplasmas; Rattus rattus; Rattus tanezumi; Rattus norvegicus; Phylogeny; 16S rRNA; Rnase P; dnaK; gapA; Gauteng Province; South Africa
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2263/92360; https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms10081632

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT : Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. These data can be found here: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/] (accessed on 9 August 2021). SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL : FIGURE S1. (a) Trimmed 120 nt fragment of the chromatogram generated when screening ectoparasite sampled using the primer setMyClost-F/Mycop-R. The colour lines denote the four nucleotide bases: adenine (A) is indicated in green, cytosine (C) is indicated in blue, guanine (G) is indicated in black and thymine (T) is indicated in red. (b) Alignment result to MK295631 produced when performing a nucleotide blast (BlastN) search for the 120 nt 16S rRNA gene fragment generated when screening a Haemaphysalis elliptica tick for haemoplasma prevalence using the MyClost-F/Mycop-R primer set. TABLE S1: Sample list of Rattus species and their associated ectoparasites screened in this study; TABLE S2: Nucleotide BlastN results obtained when performing nucleotide blast searches against the Genbank database for sequences generated when screening ectoparasites with the Myco-16S-322s/HemMycop16S-1420as primer set. TABLE S3: PCR results obtained when screening DNA extracted from buccal swabs, kidney samples, and ectoparasite samples using haemoplasma-specific PCR assays targeting the Rnase P gene region [12]. PCR screening and nucleotide sequencing revealed that samples either failed to amplify or produced non-target sequences. Invasive Rattus species are carriers of haemotropic Mycoplasmas (haemoplasmas) globally, but data from Africa are lacking. Using a PCR-sequencing approach, we assessed haemoplasma prevalence and diversity in kidney and buccal swabs collected from three invasive Rattus species (Rattus rattus, R. norvegicus and R. tanezumi) in Gauteng Province, South Africa. Whilst the overall sequence-confirmed haemoplasma prevalence was 38.4%, infection rates in R. rattus (58.3%) were significantly higher ( 2 = 12.96; df = 2; n = 99 p < 0.05) than for R. tanezumi (14.3%). Differences between host sex ( 2 = ...