Emergence of Genetic Diversity and Multi-Drug Resistant Campylobacter jejuni From Wild Birds in Beijing, China

Juan Du; Jing Luo; Jingjing Huang; Chengmin Wang; Meng Li; Bojun Wang; Bo Wang; Han Chang; Jianwei Ji; Keya Sen; Hongxuan He

doi:10.3389/fmicb.2019.02433

Emergence of Genetic Diversity and Multi-Drug Resistant Campylobacter jejuni From Wild Birds in Beijing, China

Front Microbiol. 2019 Oct 29:10:2433. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2019.02433. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Juan Du^{1

2}, Jing Luo¹, Jingjing Huang^{1

2}, Chengmin Wang³, Meng Li¹, Bojun Wang⁴, Bo Wang¹, Han Chang¹, Jianwei Ji⁴, Keya Sen⁵, Hongxuan He¹

Affiliations

¹ National Research Center for Wildlife Borne Diseases, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
² College of Life Sciences, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
³ Guangdong Key Laboratory of Animal Conservation and Resource Utilization, Guangdong Public, Laboratory of Wild Animal Conservation and Utilization, Guangdong Institute of Applied Biological Resources, Guangzhou, China.
⁴ Beijing Wildlife Rescue Center, Beijing Municipal Bureau of Landscape and Forestry, Beijing, China.
⁵ Division of Biological Sciences, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, University of Washington, Bothell, WA, United States.

Abstract

Campylobacter jejuni (C. jejuni) is considered as an opportunistic zoonotic pathogen that may cause gastroenteritis in humans and other animals. Wild birds may be as potential vectors of C. jejuni around urban and suburban areas. Here, 520 samples were collected from 33 wild bird species in urban and suburban areas, Beijing. In total 57 C. jejuni were isolated from seven species. It was found that Nineteen (33.33%, 19/57) isolates were resistant to at least one of 11 antibiotics, especially streptomycin (36.84%) and four isolates resistant to all. Nineteen (33.33%, 19/57) isolates were multi-drug resistance. Multilocus sequence typing (MLST) analysis of the isolates showed that 36 different sequence types (STs) belonged to four Clonal complexes and unassigned. Twenty STs (55.56%) and six alleles among them were first detected. Virulence genes including flaA, cadF, and the cytolethal distending toxin (CDT) gene cluster, were detected in all isolates, but truncated cdt gene clusters only detected in the isolates from the crow, daurian jackdaw and silver pheasant. In conclusion, it was the first detection of C. jejuni involved truncated cdt gene clusters from the silver pheasant. These wild birds around urban and suburban areas may pose potential public health problems as reservoir vectors of C. jejuni.

Keywords: CDT gene cluster; Campylobacter jejuni; MLST; emergence; multi-resistance; wild birds.