TY - JOUR
T1 - Mycoplasma agassizii, an opportunistic pathogen of tortoises, shows very little genetic variation across the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts
AU - Luzuriaga-Neira, Agusto
AU - Sandmeier, Franziska C.
AU - Weitzman, Chava L.
AU - Tracy, C. Richard
AU - Bauschlicher, Shalyn N.
AU - Tillett, Richard L.
AU - Alvarez-Ponce, David
N1 - This work was supported by grant
F19AC00070 from the US Fish and Wildlife Service,
and partially supported by Nevada INBRE (funded
by grant P20GM103440 from the National Institute
of General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of
Health). AL and DAP were also supported by a
grant from the National Science Foundation (MCB
1818288). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or
preparation of the manuscript.
PY - 2021/2
Y1 - 2021/2
N2 - Mycoplasma agassizii is a common cause of upper respiratory tract disease in Mojave desert tortoises (Gopherus agassizii). So far, only two strains of this bacterium have been sequenced, and very little is known about its patterns of genetic diversity. Understanding genetic variability of this pathogen is essential to implement conservation programs for their threatened, long-lived hosts. We used next generation sequencing to explore the genomic diversity of 86 cultured samples of M. agassizii collected from mostly healthy Mojave and Sonoran desert tortoises in 2011 and 2012. All samples with enough sequencing coverage exhibited a higher similarity to M. agassizii strain PS6T (collected in Las Vegas Valley, Nevada) than to strain 723 (collected in Sanibel Island, Florida). All eight genomes with a sequencing coverage over 2x were subjected to multiple analyses to detect single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Strikingly, even though we detected 1373 SNPs between strains PS6T and 723, we did not detect any SNP between PS6T and our eight samples. Our whole genome analyses reveal that M. agassizii strain PS6T may be present across a wide geographic extent in healthy Mojave and Sonoran desert tortoises.
AB - Mycoplasma agassizii is a common cause of upper respiratory tract disease in Mojave desert tortoises (Gopherus agassizii). So far, only two strains of this bacterium have been sequenced, and very little is known about its patterns of genetic diversity. Understanding genetic variability of this pathogen is essential to implement conservation programs for their threatened, long-lived hosts. We used next generation sequencing to explore the genomic diversity of 86 cultured samples of M. agassizii collected from mostly healthy Mojave and Sonoran desert tortoises in 2011 and 2012. All samples with enough sequencing coverage exhibited a higher similarity to M. agassizii strain PS6T (collected in Las Vegas Valley, Nevada) than to strain 723 (collected in Sanibel Island, Florida). All eight genomes with a sequencing coverage over 2x were subjected to multiple analyses to detect single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Strikingly, even though we detected 1373 SNPs between strains PS6T and 723, we did not detect any SNP between PS6T and our eight samples. Our whole genome analyses reveal that M. agassizii strain PS6T may be present across a wide geographic extent in healthy Mojave and Sonoran desert tortoises.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85101005589&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0245895
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0245895
M3 - Article
C2 - 33534823
AN - SCOPUS:85101005589
VL - 16
SP - 1
EP - 16
JO - PLoS One
JF - PLoS One
SN - 1932-6203
IS - 2 February
M1 - e0245895
ER -